By Poly Pantelides
NICOSIA sewerage board is busy replacing part of an aged pipe close to Nicosia’s Constantinos and Eleni cemetery that recently collapsed under the weight of its concrete encasement leading to a leakage in the area, authorities said.
Some of the sewerage leaked onto a seasonal river called Kateva that runs parallel to the pipe, Nicosia municipality said. Nicosia municipality’s health services and the sewerage board cleaned up and decontaminated part of the river bed last week, it said. The municipality said the sewerage board’s pipe was some 20 years old and was now being upgraded.
Technical director with the Nicosia Sewerage Board, Savvas Hadjineocleous, said that heavy rainfall may have contributed to the collapse but that they only saw last week that the pipe had started leaking.
Though the pipe needed replacing along a 20-metre stretch, the board will replace 100 metres of it with a sun-resistant pipe that does not need to be encased in concrete, he said. In the meantime, sewerage is being collected by a tanker and taken to Vathia Gonia wastewater treatment plant. This was possible because the pipe did not service big amounts of sewerage, Hadjineocleous said.
Asked if they had observed any problems elsewhere along the pipeline and the river Kateva, Hadjineocleous said they had not and that the pipe leak itself was “nothing unusual” by the board’s standards.
Nicosia municipality – which issued the announcement – was busy last October clearing flooded roads along the river area following a bout of rain. Residents had complained then that authorities were slow to clean up rubbish in the Sopaz area in Palouriotissa.
One person told the Cyprus Mail that he was given the run-around when he tried to get the municipality to clean up before the rains started. But the same person said that in late April he notified both Nicosia municipality and Aglandjia municipality over what seemed to be sewerage leakage or industrial pollution along Kateva and Aglandjia rivers close to the Sopaz area.
There were stinking stagnant waters and obvious signs of apparent industrial pollution, he said. Although the problem lay within the confines of Aglandjia municipality, it was Nicosia municipality that got in touch about a month later, forwarding the information to the Water Development Board that notified the environment department. “I think they are taking this seriously,” he said.
