Kwekwe City Council has embarked on the rehabilitation of its water purification plant to ensure residents get an uninterrupted water supply, a council official has said.
The city council last year started rehabilitating its water network by replacing some worn-out valves and this year has plans to rehabilitate filter pads, according to Engineer John Mhike, the Director of Works at Kwekwe City Council.
“We are going to intervene this year in a bigger way we are going to rehabilitate the filter pads at the plant to ensure there is sufficient water flowing into the city.” Mhike added, “We want to clean the reservoirs at the plant so they maintain the capacity of the of the reservoirs so that they continue to have the original capacity instead of the smaller capacity because of sludge accumulation in the reservoir.”
He said they intended to continue upgrading water lines, which are now old and needed to be replaced.
“We have already started rehabilitation or upgrades of the water network we started in Amaveni W Squares, where the lines are small lines which were put in the colonial era and we need to gradually replace them. We are also going to move to Mbizo, identify such areas and replace the pipelines, the old small pipelines, which are having continuous bursts, with the right size pipes.”
The city council also planned to replace the sewer trunk lines which are now “overwhelmed” and are failing to “cope” with the increased volume of sewage, Mhike revealed.
“Under sewer reticulation, we need to upgrade various areas where the trunk sewer lines, the lines which take sewage to the treatment plans, are now overwhelmed by the flow, so we are going to ensure that we upgrade. We have got the Mbizo 3 to Mbizo 19 trunk line which needs to be changed to a bigger pipeline, the 5 to 5 so that it copes with the incoming flow,” Mhike said.
He added: “We are also going to complete the Amaveni upgrade which we started last year in 2022, ensure that the upgrade is complete so that we give rescue to the people. Amaveni, the W Squares, Kushinga primary school, we are going to ensure that we complete those upgrades this year.”
The rehabilitation of the city`s water and sewer reticulation system is part of the projects budgeted for by the local authority this year.