I was the EIA Site Manager on the $10 million reconstruction of the water supply for Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city, from June 2015 to June 2016. FIDIC Red Book, financed by the Asian Development Bank, designed by OJSC Kyrgyzgiprostroy. My scope covered electrical, instrumentation, and automation delivery across the intake, transmission line, and storage.
Osh has watched caravans pass for three thousand years. By 2015, its Soviet-era system was losing 40 percent of everything it produced, and seasonal cholera outbreaks were traced back to a contaminated river intake. The source itself was the hazard, which meant the project could not begin with pipes.
It began with a 300-metre infiltration gallery in the Ak-Buura gravels, built from slotted pipes ranging from 1600 to 1000 mm in diameter. Instead of drawing from an exposed river intake, the gallery harvests water through the riverbed's own gravels - natural pre-filtration that ended the era of contaminated source water. Around it, gabion embankments and 350 m of flood protection structures armour the intake zone against the flash floods that had repeatedly destroyed anything placed in the river's path.
From there, 4.7 km of diameter 1000 mm HDPE transmission main replaced the failing trunk, feeding twin 6,000 m3 reservoirs - 12,000 m3 of storage giving the city pressure stability and reserve. A vacuum chlorination plant handles disinfection, dosed against flow rather than at a fixed rate, so the water is safe without chemical excess.
The constraint that shaped the programme was that a city of 600,000 could not be left dry while its supply backbone was rebuilt. Works were sequenced across the intake, transmission and storage fronts so that service continued throughout. The hillside mahallas at the pressure-starved edges of the network were the real test - first to lose water historically, and the ones that had to be provably supplied at handover.
My part covered the electrical and control works across intake, pumping and storage: power distribution, instrumentation, and the dosing control tied to measured flow. Loop checks and commissioning ran through the final months before the system was proven across the city's pressure zones.
Handover was in June 2016. Twenty-four-hour pressurised water reached the hillside mahallas, and by 2017 health data recorded an 80 percent reduction in waterborne disease. The quieter measure was that people stopped boiling what came out of the tap. This project ran in parallel with the other Kyrgyz works in the same ADB programme, and I rotated between the sites continuously.
WSS Osh, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY