End in sight for Cairo’s sewerage nightmare

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 29

End in sight for Cairo’s sewerage nightmare

Ry

ASHRAF FOUAD

through NZPA Cairo

The end is in sight for Cairo’s nightmare that its overloaded sewers might burst and flood the streets.

A giant waste-water scheme is under way with the aim of building a system that can survive the rampant population growth of Africa’s largest city.

The $3 billion project, said by its managers to be the world’s biggest public health engineering scheme, will also use processed sewage to' turn desert into a green belt round this ancient, sprawling capital.

The project, which began in 1983, will take at least five years to complete, according to Mustafa Fahmi, head of Cairo’s Sewerage Authority, but its long-term benefits are clear to all. Cairo’s sewers’ were built in 1915 to serve a million people. The city now has 13 million people, and the population increases an estimated 1000 a day. By the year 2000, Cairo will produce 4.6 million cubic metres of sewage a day — 100 times the 1930 figure and three times that of today. Processed sewage will help irrigate 106,000 hectares of desert land round the city. The first task of the

American-British Consultants operating consortium was to improve the existing sewerage network and renew 100 existing pumping stations to stop sewage leaks that plagued parts of the city.

“The sewers were in a very run-down state, and broke regularly because of overloading and high silt levels in the pipes,” said the project director, David Kell, a Briton.

British contractors are building a $1.9 billion sewerage network east of the Nile, while American firms are working on a $1 billion scheme on the west bank.

Lord Selsdon, chairman of British Wastewater, a company which liaises between British contractors and Egypt, said a British grant and soft bank loans accounted for one-third of the cost, with Egypt funding the rest.

He said that a world underground tunnelling record was set on the project when a contractor dug 104 m in a week at a depth of 20m. British engineers are building a 17km main tunnel, 5m wide and 20m to 30m deep. It will be fed by 33km of subsidiary piping.

Eventually, the main pipe will pour sewage into a pumping station at Amerlya, east of the Nile, which will take it to a treatment plant at Jebel el-Asfar (the yellow mountain), 14km away. The plant will process the waste water and use it to irrigate desert. Five big tunnelling

machines digging under the streets of Cairo had finished I.skm of the main tunnel, Mr Kell said in a presentation to Government officials and the press.

On the west bank of the Nile — less populated than the east, but expanding as new residential areas spring up on the outskirts — United States firms are also Improving existing sewers, extending services into unsewered areas, and building a big collector pipe and treatment plant near the desert. Given the scale of the Cairo waste-water project, there have been remarkably few mishaps and delays, managers say. Work was held up briefly last summer when engineers hit water while sinking a 45m caisson for a pumping station. Big boulders not shown on . geological records forced modification of drilling machines at another site.

On one occasion, antiquities authorities stepped in after engineers hit an old city wall underground. Contractors had to dig round it, Mr Kell said.