I was EIA Site Manager on the $10.5 million water and sewerage rebuild for Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan's third-largest city, from June 2015 to June 2016. FIDIC Red Book with ADB financing, and both systems were delivered within a single construction season.
The trigger was blunt. The city's last functioning Soviet-era well failed in 2015, and source capacity had to be rebuilt from zero, fast. Farmers in the Fergana Valley were trading livestock for water deliveries while it was being sorted out.
Six new wells were drilled 135 metres down, through cracked bedrock into a pristine aquifer that ignores surface drought, with intake protection works shielding the source from flood damage. Every one of those wells was a drilling gamble at that depth, and the wellfield is what the whole scheme rests on.
Above ground, 12.4 km of diameter 500 mm HDPE mains form the distribution backbone - enough to span the city three times over - with vacuum chlorination for disinfection. Two earthquake-resistant 3,000 m3 reservoirs give 6,000 m3 of stable storage. On the wastewater side, 3 km of new leak-proof sewage lines in diameters of 200 to 350 mm ended the illegal discharges that had been poisoning the irrigation canals feeding the valley's farms.
The part I was there for is the one that keeps the rest alive. Pumps are only as reliable as their power, and grid blackouts in the region would take an entire water system down with them. So the scheme carries its own electrical spine: four 250 kVA transformer stations fed by a new 10 kV supply line, a full 1 MVA of dedicated backbone. Pumping, chlorination and controls were wired, loop-checked and commissioned as one system rather than as separate packages.
Running water supply and sewerage in the same twelve-month window meant the city could not be left dry at one end or flooded at the other. Work fronts were mobilised across the wellfield, the reservoirs, the network and the sewerage simultaneously, and sequenced so service was maintained through the changeover.
The dual system was handed over in June 2016, serving roughly 150,000 residents, with a 300 percent increase in supply continuity. The test came the same year: when the 2016 drought parched the Fergana Valley, Jalal-Abad recorded zero dry taps.
WSS Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY