ADB funding for Colombo's sewerage system

Lakshmi de Silva

Colombo city's sewerage system facing collapse at several points in city built in 1920 for a population of 50,000 citizens has now to cope with 600,000 permanent residents plus another 600,000 who come into the city daily.

A project to modernize the sewerage system with an Asian Development Bank funding of US$ 116 million (Rs. 12.2 billion) is to be started during the current year, Colombo Municipal Council Commissioner (CMC) Badrani Jayawardene told the Daily News yesterday.

The old sewerage system designed in the previous century by the British has begun to collapse due to weaknesses in the system at different points due to various reasons including old clay pipes breaking down and for pressures created by gases, a senior engineer said.

Such breakdowns have occurred at Dickmans Road, Amarasekera Mawatha, near New Olympia theatre, two at Wellawatte, Madampitiya and Modera but it is almost miraculous how the system coped with such a population increase as the old designers and engineers had designed the sewer conduits large enough to handle much more than the sewage discharged in the city at that time. Still there was too much of pressure and natural problems that made the system obsolete, he said.

The 360 kilometre long sewage conduits built with 14 pumping stations for the disposal of sewage needed modernization and higher capacity to cope with the population that had multiplied over the years.

The designing of the modernized sewage system is to be started in July.

Although the old sewerage system needed improvement many decades back, the CMC was unable to raise funds to modernize the sewerage system and successive governments too had failed to address the problem, he said.