I was the EIA Site Manager on the $4 million sewerage and pumping station reconstruction at Karakol, from June 2015 to June 2016. FIDIC Red Book with ADB financing, designed by OJSC Kyrgyzgiprostroy, with Ludwig Pfeiffer as contractor under Dohwa supervision.
Karakol is a base camp for Tian Shan trekking and Issyk-Kul ski tourism. Underground, it was running on Soviet-era sewers that froze and burst every spring thaw, flooding basements with raw waste and putting untreated sewage into the Chon-Aksuu River. A cholera outbreak in 2014 was the project's starting point, which made this a public health deadline rather than a convenience upgrade.
Twelve kilometres of new DN 200-400 sewer were laid beneath a living tourist town - hotels, apple orchards and daily traffic above every metre of the route. The new lines are glass-reinforced pipe, chosen to shrug off both the seismic movement and the corrosion that killed the Soviet network.
Something I still think was the smartest part of that design: the manholes carry seismic sensors. The network reports ground events itself instead of waiting for someone to discover a collapse. On a fault-prone route under a town, that turns an unknown into a monitored condition.
Three derelict pumping stations were rebuilt, and the awkward part was that they had to keep some service running while being reconstructed around their own wet wells. Each came back with cavitation-proof impellers sized for mountain-grade duty - 160 m3 an hour against 45 m of head, 480 m3 an hour combined.
My scope was the electrical, instrumentation, and control works across the three stations, including SCADA integration so the pumping fleet can be monitored remotely. That is the difference between operators seeing a problem and residents smelling one. Everything was specified for -25 C freeze-thaw cycling rather than catalogue conditions, from burial depths to materials and joints.
Handover was June 2016. No more raw sewage in the Chon-Aksuu and no more spring basement floods. The verdict that stuck came from a hotel owner, who said his guests had stopped complaining about the smell - which, in a town banking on tourism, is the whole return on the investment.
SPS Karakol, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY