WWTP Enesai was the first ADB-funded modular wastewater treatment plant in Kyrgyzstan. It treats 250 m3 a day for 1,250 residents of the Bazar-Korgon apartment district in the Tian Shan foothills - eight apartment blocks, two kindergartens, and a school. I ran the electrical, instrumentation, and automation delivery as EIA Site Manager between June 2015 and June 2016, under FIDIC Red Book with design by OJSC Kyrgyzgiprostroy.
The received wisdom was that prefabricated treatment plants do not survive Kyrgyz winters. This one was built to test that, and being first meant every approval, every test, and every doubt had to be answered without a reference plant anywhere in the country to point at.
German-designed prefabricated modules were shipped in and assembled on site, which brought factory quality to a remote valley and kept field construction risk low. The process is extended aeration with UV disinfection, and it had to meet Kyrgyzstan's fishery effluent standards - stricter than the receiving river's own water quality. It passed at 100 percent compliance.
The climate span is the design case: -30 C to +40 C. Biological treatment lives or dies on temperature, and the bioreactor had to keep its biology alive through Tian Shan winters. The insulation was redesigned mid-construction, after the first hard frosts made the limits of the original specification obvious. That is the kind of change that is cheap during assembly and impossible afterwards.
The site also sits in a seismic zone, so the standard modular design needed earthquake-resistant adaptations rather than a straight import of the catalogue product.
My scope was the electrical, instrumentation, and control systems, completed and loop-checked ahead of biological start-up, then the commissioning and proving of the process and the UV disinfection against the fishery standard.
The other problem was not technical at all. The village had actively protested the construction next to their homes. That was answered with open tank demonstration days during commissioning, which turned the protesters into the plant's proudest visitors - it became the local school's favourite field trip. The plant was handed over in June 2016 as a working prototype for how modular systems can solve the water problems of Central Asia's remote valleys. It was delivered as a sub-project of the wider $4.5 million Bazar-Korgon rehabilitation.
WWTP Enesai, Kyrgyzstan - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY