Ali­cia Llanos

Res­i­dents of Fairview, Mo­ka, will have to the foot the bill to re­pair the leak­ing sew­er­age plant in the area, says Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Gan­ga Singh. Singh was speak­ing yes­ter­day at a WASA press con­fer­ence in front of the plant, in Mo­ka, Mar­aval. He said the plant did not be­long to WASA, but was built by the de­vel­op­er of Fairview, close to 30 years ago. Singh said af­ter the hous­ing project was com­plet­ed, the de­vel­op­er aban­doned the plant, mak­ing it an "or­phan plant."

"This is a clas­sic case, cre­at­ing a de­vel­op­ment with the nec­es­sary in­fra­struc­ture and then aban­don­ing it hav­ing sold the plots...There are over 200 sim­i­lar plants up for adop­tion by WASA," he said. Singh said for the adop­tion to take place, it was crit­i­cal that the plant be brought up to par, so that WASA did not need to en­gage in any fur­ther cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture. He said a ma­jor prob­lem with sewage be­ing leaked in­to the wa­ter­way was that it put more strain on the util­i­ty's wa­ter treat­ment plant in Mar­aval to clean the wa­ter for dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Singh said Mar­aval had one of the high­est con­cen­tra­tions of chlo­rine in it's pipe-borne wa­ter, be­cause of the poor qual­i­ty of wa­ter be­ing processed by the treat­ment plant.

He said WASA would adopt the plant to en­sure it was main­tained prop­er­ly, but res­i­dents of the Fairview De­vel­op­ment would have to pay to have the plant up and run­ning again. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Mo­ka Res­i­dents As­so­ci­a­tion David Bel­grave said over the last six or sev­en years res­i­dents of Fairview had spent more than $700,000 of their own mon­ey on the plant. Bel­grave said the plant was not hand­ed over to them, but they as­sumed re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for it be­cause it had been aban­doned by the de­vel­op­er. He said eight years ago, the as­so­ci­a­tion ap­proached WASA to adopt the plant.

Bel­grave said the as­so­ci­a­tion raised the funds and bought the plant up to the re­quired stan­dards. He said, how­ev­er, right be­fore the adop­tion process was com­plet­ed WASA pulled out. Bel­grave said the as­so­ci­a­tion is con­sult­ing with rel­e­vant par­ties to en­sure the plant is made op­er­a­tional again and that WASA sticks to its word and adopts it. Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) Dr Joth Singh said the EMA would work in con­sul­ta­tion with the res­i­dents as­so­ci­a­tion and WASA to en­sure all re­pairs done to plant com­ply with en­vi­ron­men­tal leg­is­la­tion.