Effluent treatment: End of the line

The queue from hell, the long lines of sewage tankers that clog up the streets leading up to the Al Aweer Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), will disappear by June this year, Dubai Municipality officials said.

“The first stage of phase one of the Jebel Ali Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) should go live by April 12,'' said Taleb Julfar, Director of the Drainage and Irrigation Department at Dubai Municipality, adding it would handle a flow of 150,000 cubic metres of sewage per day.

“We aim to have the tanker problem solved by mid-June.''

This should come as a big relief to Mohammad Abdul Aziz Najem Al Awadi, Head of Sewage Treatment at Dubai Municipality. Al Awadi said the Al Aweer plant was already overloaded and waiting for relief.

Biggest problem

“Our biggest problem is that we have eight-kilometre-long tanker queues outside the Al Aweer plant; we receive about 2,500 tankers daily, that's about 110,000 cubic metres, which represents around 25 per cent of our total daily intake of sewage.'' Tanker drivers have been known to spend as long as 30 hours waiting in queues before they get to the discharge bays. The situation had forced many tankers to illegally discharge raw sewage into storm drains which, in turn, were polluting beaches. XPRESS had exposed these violators in December 2007.

* Read XPRESS story on Sewage menace.

The municipality has since placed a Dh2,000 reward for information leading to the capture of such violating companies; it also enforces a two-month impounding of the vehicle and a fine of up to Dh100,000.

“The Al Aweer STP was completed in 1989 with a capacity to treat 130,000 cubic metres of sewage per day. In 2001, we upgraded the capacity to 260,000 cubic metres per day. But nobody expected the sudden construction boom that Dubai witnessed,'' Al Awadi explained.

He added that the capacity of the Al Aweer plant would be expanded to 330,000 cubic metres per day before the end of the year.

Dubai produces nearly 500,000 cubic metres of raw sewage per day – enough to fill 200 Olympic-size swimming pools.

“We are working at about 75 to 80 per cent above installed capacity, but with 20 years of experience and continuous upgrades, we have been finding ways to cope with the overload.''

Data collected by Dubai Municipality's Drainage and Irrigation Department shows that Dubai's sewage output has doubled in the last five years and tripled since 1999.

“Through the drainage network we get about 380,000 cubic metres of sewage per day and we get around 100,000 cubic metres per day from tankers,'' said Abdul Majid Safaee, Director of Drainage Network Department at Dubai Municipality.

So much water

“Only three to five per cent of this is actual sewage, which is turned into compost. The rest is all water,'' said Safaee.

“People need to learn to conserve water. If everybody reduces their consumption by even 10 per cent, we can save 50,000 cubic metres of water per day,'' he said. Construction of the Dh1.4 billion Jebel Ali STP will take place in three phases. “We split phase one into two stages due to the urgent need for the plant to go live,'' said Julfar.

“Stage one is to be completed by April 12 and stage two on April 10 next year. Phase one, which is 70 per cent completed, will allow the plant to treat 300,000 cubic metres per day. Once the plant is completed, it will be able to treat one million cubic metres of sewage per day,'' he said.

The network

More than 182km of pipeline is being installed to shift the drainage network from the Bur Dubai side of the Dubai Creek to the new Jebel Ali STP. Al Aweer STP will only handle the Deira network after April 12.

“The pipeline project cost is about Dh1.7 billion,'' said Engineer Abdul Majid Khojasteh, Drainage and Irrigation Expert Consultant for Dubai Municipality.

“There is a huge demand on irrigation water. We used to use the excess water to replenish the aquifers in Al Khawaneej, but demand is so high, I don't think there will be any left at the STPs. “We sell water to developers at half-a-fils per gallon,'' he said. He said that in a year's time, Al Warqa and Al Muhaisnah will be connected to the grid, as will most labour camps. “We don't want to encourage tanker use,'' he said.

Scada system

With the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and telemetry systems, 137 stations around the emirate can be controlled and monitored by one person. “The system compiles data from the six main stations and 131 sub-stations and allows us to have 24/7 monitoring of the network and control each station remotely,'' said Abdul Majid Safaee, Director of Drainage and Irrigation Network Department, Dubai Municipality.

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