City to face water scarcity

Oct 17, 2009

KAMPALA is to face an acute water shortage between October 27 and 30, the National Water and Sewerage Cooperation has announced.

BY JEFF LULE

KAMPALA is to face an acute water shortage between October 27 and 30, the National Water and Sewerage Cooperation has announced.

The Kampala manager, Andrew Sekayizi, at a press briefing at their plant in Ggaba, said they would be installing a new system to improve water treatment, quality and production.

“We are facing the problem of a high rate of pollution in the lake which has posed a big threat to the quality of water. We have decided to fix an automation machine to improve and detect the quality of water distributed to the public,” Sekayizi said.

He explained that the plant will be running at half capacity and asked the public to use the water sparingly.

He said the lake water had been contaminated with green algae, which has affected the filtering machines and production consequently.

“Our filters get dirty easily and we need to clean them more than five times unlike in the past when we used to clean them once,” he noted.

He added that previously, they required only 14mg of Alum chemical to treat one litre of water, but today the same volume of requires 140mg (10 times).

Sekayizi also attributed this to the high pollution in the lake to the chemicals from industries and waste from people living near the lake.

He stressed the need for sensitisation programmes to mitigate pollution.

He also added the reduced water levels had also affected their production.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});