By Martin Hellicar
ONLY six months’ water supply remains in reservoirs, so the government is looking to squeeze every last drop from other sources and trusting in God to provide.
“Supplies will last, we hope, until the next rainy season, and we certainly will add from underground sources if need be, but from then on it’s down to God,” Dr Georgios Socratous, a senior Hydrologist at the Water Development department said.
Socratous described the current water situation as “very tragic” and said things would become desperate if last year’s pattern repeats and the expected rainfall fails to materialise this winter.
There are currently only 33.5 million cubic meters behind dam walls, which amounts to 12.5 per cent of capacity. At the same time last year, after another very dry winter, there were 53.2 million cubic metres in reservoirs, or 19.8 per cent of capacity.
With water cuts as deep as they can go, the government is pulling out all the stops to get a second desalination plant built as fast as possible, but this is not expected to start operating before the year 2000.
Socratous detailed what other sources remained to be tapped.
“There are some more distant underground water sources, but we need works – conveyors – to get the water to where it’s needed,” he said. He said plans for such conveyors were already drawn up and they could be ready “soon” if necessary.
“We can also requisition more private bore-holes, though we don’t like to, so we try to negotiate to buy the water from owners,” Socratous said.
The state is already using water from a large number of private wells.
It is also providing subsidies for home-owners to sink fresh bore-holes to provide water for toilets and irrigation.
Socratous admitted that this policy would lead to a further lowering of the water table, but said this was not something to worry about.
“The 15 to 20 cm drop in the water table caused by increased pumping will not affect trees one way or another because trees have their roots in the top few centimetres of soil anyway,” he said.
He said the water pumped from subsidised bore-holes was in any case polluted by years of seepage from cesspits and was therefore not suitable for drinking or even crop irrigation.
“We are very careful about where we subsidise wells. We do it in built-up areas where pollution means the (underground) water cannot be used for anything else,” he said.
The high bacterial counts in groundwater under major conurbations also explains why — despite the prolonged drought — municipality trucks can be seen out pouring tons of precious water on roadside greens.
“Municipalities use (irrigation) water from non-suitable sources, like from the Nicosia water table which is recharged by cesspit water and so is unfit for any other use,” a senior Nicosia Water board engineer said.
