I was the EIA Site Manager on the $4.5 million water rehabilitation at Bazar-Korgon, a village of 8,000 in Jalal-Abad province, running from June 2015 to June 2016 under the FIDIC Red Book with ADB financing.
Before it, the village lived on six hours of rationed water a day and lost 60 percent of that to leaks before it reached a tap. Big enough to matter, small enough to be last in line for everything - and a community that had watched promises come and go, sceptical of yet another construction crew arriving.
The transmission main was so degraded that conventional replacement would have meant digging up the entire village and its orchards. Instead, 12.4 km of it was resurrected with trenchless technology: the streets and the apple orchards stayed intact while the pipes beneath them were rebuilt. A further 4.5 km of new frost-proof HDPE in diameters 110 to 250 mm closed the gaps in the network.
The wellfield was down to its last legs. Two historic wells were rehabilitated and a new one drilled to 85 m into a clean aquifer, giving a resilient three-well source instead of a single point of failure, with a new chlorination plant securing quality from the wellfield to the taps.
The scope carried its own power, right-sized for a village rather than borrowed from a city design: a 250 kVA transformer station on a new 10 kV line, keeping the pumps running independently of the village grid's troubles. That, the pumping controls and the instrumentation across wells and network were my scope, finished, tested and commissioned through the cold season.
Sanitation closed the loop. 2.4 km of diameter 350 mm sewers were laid to carry wastewater to the new Enesai modular treatment plant - clean water in at one end, safely treated water out at the other, which is rarer at village scale than it should be.
The whole utility rebuild fitted inside a $4.5 million envelope. At handover in June 2016, the village had water around the clock for the first time, with 98 percent of households connected, and by 2017 health data recorded an 80 percent reduction in waterborne illness. The orchards drink reliably too.
WSS Bazar-Korgon, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY