THE COUNCIL of Ministers yesterday let stand a House of Representatives vote killing a desalination plant planned for the Limassol suburb of Zakaki, opting instead to build a plant in Paralimni on the east coast. Limassol will not benefit from any of the fresh water produced by the new facility, which it is estimated will take two years to complete.
The Cabinet decision was announced by Agriculture Minister Costas Themistocleous, whose ministry oversees the Water Development Department (WDD).
The decision will mean tighter water rationing throughout the island, especially for the Limassol area since the Zakaki plant was to have gone on line by June to help the island through the summer drought.
Last month deputies yielded to a vocal campaign by Zakaki residents, and refused to fund the desalination plant planned for the area. The residents feared the plant would interfere with tourism on Lady’s Mile Beach and lower their land values.
Some deputies also accused the government of failing to carry out the required environmental impact studies on the Zakaki site before seeking tenders. They also argued there were more suitable sites nearby, one of them at Akrotiri.
But Akrotiri residents wanted none of this, and last week reiterated their opposition to siting a desalination plant anywhere near their homes.
Themistocleous yesterday denied the Paralimni decision was an attempt to blackmail Limassol into accepting a desalination plant. Last month he did say the House vote on Zakaki "means the people of Limassol will suffer more if we don’t have the desalination plant ready" before the summer.
But yesterday he insisted the Paralimni unit was not being seen as replacing the now-dead Zakaki plant. It "has to do with the unit we had originally decided to build in Ayios Theodoros, in Larnaca, in order to complete the 100,000 cubic metres per day of water needed by the three districts@ (Larnaca, Famagusta and Nicosia), he said.
As in Zakaki, opposition by Ayios Theodoros residents to a desalination unit ultimately killed the project.
Themistocleous noted that Limassol would still need its own desalination unit, capable of producing 20,000 cubic metres of water per day, if current water rationing is to be lifted: "Therefore this is not blackmail, and we will continue the effort to achieve consensus to create a unit in Limassol," he said.
Of the several water decisions Themistocleous said the Cabinet unanimously reached yesterday, the Paralimni plant led the list.
While he admitted it would not cover Limassol’s needs, the Minister said it would one day cover Paralimni’s needs the way the plant being built in Larnaca will cover Larnaca’s needs, and the Dhekelia plant, the island’s only such unit, will ultimately cover most of Nicosia’s needs.
The Cabinet yesterday also decided to continue studying what went wrong with planning the Zakaki facility, and to see how to site a plant there that would ultimately meet everyone’s needs.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet agreed to sink more bore-holes and even commandeer some private wells to provide the island with water for the summer, since the Paralimni plant will not be on-line for at least two years, Themistocleous said.
Many of the island=s coastal aquifers are tainted by seawater and unusable, however, others are bone-dry, and the rest are in danger of being overpumped, with no rainfall to recharge them.
With rainfall at only 46 per cent of normal this winter, reservoirs are a mere 10 per cent full with 24 million cubic metres of water, where they held twice that amount this time last year.
The Dhekelia desalination plant, the only one in Cyprus, can produce 40,000 cubic metres of fresh water per day. The Zakaki and Ayios Theodoros plants were each to have produced 20,000 cubic metres.
