PROGRESS MADE WITH BOREHOLE PROJECT
Good progress is being made with the borehole project to augment the Mossel Bay Municipality’s water supply. The yield to date is three million litres of water a day.
Phase one of the project commenced in May 2010 and entailed the drilling of seventeen boreholes. A second phase, which involves the drilling of 21 boreholes at this stage, has commenced. It is expected to be completed towards the end of November 2010.
Two of the boreholes, one with a recommended yield of 11 litres per second at Kleinbos near Friemersheim, and the second, with a recommended yield of 4 litres per second at the Dana Bay reservoir, have already been equipped and tied into the municipal water supply system.
Two more boreholes, another at Kleinbos, with a recommended yield of 6 litres per second, and the other, at the Barnyard, with a recommended yield of 10 litres per second are due to be commissioned soon.
PetroSA, which, together with the Municipality, is a major user of water from the Wolwedans Dam, contributed R10 million to the cost of the borehole programme. The estimated total cost is R12 million.
Water has been struck in a fifth borehole at Dana Bay. It had a blow yield of 10 litres per second but the water is brackish and may be of limited use.
The borehole project is one of several projects which the Municipality launched to ensure that Mossel Bay has enough water should its main source of water, the Wolwedans Dam, run empty. The dam was 15,7 per cent full at the beginning of the week and is expected to run empty within the next few months if it does not rain enough before then.
The other projects include the waste water reclamation project at Hartenbos that was commissioned at the end of June 2010 to supply five million litres of water a day to PetroSA’s synthetic fuels plant in exchange for an equal share from the company’s quota from the dam.
Another is the seawater desalination project, which is designed to produce 15 million litres of water a day, and is scheduled to be completed in February 2011. The Municipality will be entitled to 10 million litres of its daily production. PetroSA will be entitled to the rest as the company is a co-funder of the project.
The water from the Hartebeeskuil Dam is also brackish but can be purified to an acceptable quality at the Municipality’s water treatment works at Little Brak River. The project will be completed this week and will initially supply approximately three million litres of water a day. The water shortage has justified the cost of pumping water from this dam into the municipal water supply system.
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