How to optimise water cuts

By Martin Hellicar

DESPITE severe water shortages, the Nicosia Water Board is extending continuous water supply in the capital until tomorrow at least, saying it wants to study ways of optimising the system of water cuts.

While reiterating that the island’s water situation remained dire, Water Board director-general Charalambos Palantzis told the Cyprus Mail yesterday that three extra days without water cuts “did not make much difference” to reserves.

Nicosians have been allowed unlimited water since Christmas Eve, in what the board termed its “Christmas present” to consumers, and cuts had been due to re-start on Thursday.

But Palantzis yesterday said water cuts would not resume until tomorrow at the earliest. “We wanted to extend supply for three days to see how the system worked under ‘normal’ circumstances, when residents had returned from holidays,” he said.

He said the board wanted to re-assess the water-cuts system with the aim of minimising customer inconvenience while optimising water saving.

“Cuts cause inconvenience to the public, can lead to water being coloured when the supply is turned back on and are bad for the pipes. The pipes are like human blood vessels, it’s not good for them to turn supply on and off all the time,” he said.

“We want to know exactly what consumption will be under circumstances of full supply,” he said.

“If we find that we are cutting water just for the sake of saving a couple of hundred tons then it is not worth doing it so often,” Palantzis said. He added, however, that abandoning the water cuts system altogether was an impossibility.

“Cuts are unavoidable, we just want to make sure we are doing it properly,” the board director-general said.

Palantzis has previously denied suggestions the lifting of water cuts had anything to do with electioneering.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.