Nampula reservoir is 100% full, but problems with city’s water supply will continue

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Nampula reservoir is 100% full, but problems with city’s water supply will continue

10:46 CAT | 10 Mar 2021

Photo: Wamphula Fax

The dam on the Monapo River, in the northern Mozambican province of Nampula, which provides most of Nampula city’s water supply, reached 100 per cent of its maximum capacity over the last few days, the government’s Water Supply Investment and Assets Fund (FIPAG) reported on Monday.

Victor Tauacale, the FIPAG director-general, who recently visited the dam, said the reservoir (which can hold about four billion cubic metres of water) is full, thus reducing the shortage of drinking water for the estimated 800,000 residents of the city.

“The water supply will be back to normal”, he said. “However I would like to ask consumers to rationalise their use of water. From Tuesday onwards we will pump 40,000 cubic metres a day, our maximum capacity.”

Tauacale warned that problems with Nampula’s water supply will continue, as the increase in demand is far outstripping the increase in supply.

The city needs currently 120,000 cubic metres of water a day – three times what FIPAG says it can supply. Tauacale said work intended to increase water harvesting for the city is underway in the Namiteca and Muatala well-fields.

“We expect to finish the work by the end of the month. The situation is back to normal but we will keep on looking for alternatives to strengthen our production capacity,” he said, adding that the well-field in Namiteca, in the outskirts of the city, has boreholes which can produce a 6,000 cubic metres a day.

The Nampula water authorities plan to open more boreholes in order to reach a target of 20,000 cubic metres a day from Namiteca. Studies conducted on the Muatala well-field have proved it to be not only productive, but also complementary to the efforts underway.

However, Tauacale said a permanent solution to the city’s water supply problem, which reached critical levels in 2020, depends on the construction of the Mugica dam on the Monapo river, about ten kilometres north of the city.

Source: AIM