I was EIA Site Manager on the $1.6 million water supply upgrade across Cholpon-Ata and neighbouring Balykchy, on the north shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, from June 2015 to June 2016. FIDIC Red Book with ADB financing, two towns inside one modest budget.
The problem was seasonal arithmetic. Winter population is around 15,000 locals; in summer, the same infrastructure carries 65,000 people. A system sized for a village was being hammered by a resort season, and the consequences ran both ways - visitors avoided the tap water outright, which is a reputational threat to a town that lives on hospitality, while failing pipes leaked pollution back toward the lake the whole economy is built on.
Source capacity came first. The Bakyt and Chkalova wells were rehabilitated at 30 kW each, and a new Novaya borehole was drilled and equipped at 100 m3 an hour to cover Balykchy's demand, all completed ahead of the tourist season rather than during it.
The second-level pumping station was rebuilt around three 75 kW pumps with smart load balancing, giving 350 m3 an hour that scales cleanly between a quiet winter and a packed August. Alongside it went 280 kW of energy-efficient replacements, which is what makes the seasonal peaks affordable to run rather than just possible.
Issyk-Kul is seismically active, so the pumping and well structures were retrofitted to earthquake-resistant standards rather than simply refurbished. That is invisible work that only ever proves itself on a day nobody wants.
My scope covered the electrical, instrumentation, and control side: German sensors integrated with the control system, the reservoir and network works, and the commissioning and balancing of the whole scheme before the summer surge arrived. Good infrastructure here means a monitored network that runs unnoticed.
Handover was June 2016, with water around the clock across the resort strip and a 60 percent reduction in lakeside contamination. The brief nobody writes into a resort contract is the one that actually mattered: leave the lake at least as clean as you found it. This project ran in parallel with the other Kyrgyz works in the same ADB programme.
WSS Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY