LookAtVietnam – HCM City wastes more than 500,000 cu.m of clean water a day, resulting in a loss of VND500 billion (US$28 million) every year, according to director Nguyen Ton of the Viet Nam Water Supply and Sewerage Association.

Clean water is produced at Ha Noi’s Yen Phu Water Company. Despite a large amount of water supplied every day, people still face clean water shortages due to waste.

Ly Chung Dan, deputy general director of the Sai Gon Water Supply Corporation (Sawaco) which co-organised the conference, said the main reason for water leakage was probably the use of old pipes. About 30 per cent of 3,400km of the city’s water pipelines, which were cracked in several places, were installed 30 years ago.

The work on tracking the old pipes to replace them with new ones faced many challenges because there was no documentation on their exact locations, like a pipeline map, he added.

Clive Harrison, an expert on water waste prevention from Singapore, recommended the city replaces 300km of pipelines a year and avoid using disjointed pipes which required joints that led to leakage.

Sawaco’s general director Tran Dinh Phu said from now until 2015, the city needed VND9 trillion ($505 million) to upgrade and replace the pipeline system.

Dan added that the corporation was carrying out one major project in two densely populated areas. Area 1 included districts 1, 3, 5 and 10, and area 2 comprised Tan Binh and Tan Phu districts.

The projects, worth $45 million sponsored by the World Bank, expect to reduce leakage proportion by 2012 to 10 per cent per day – or about 125,000 cubic meters of water.

Water pipeline networks in other districts are being studied with funds from the Asia Development Bank in order to set up new projects for preventing wastage of clean water.

The estimated cost for projects in the areas under study was around $60 million, Dan said.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News