News

WAF infrastructure needs maintenance

February 13, 2023 6:30 am

The aging infrastructure is one of the major challenges facing the Water Authority of Fiji.

Chief Operating Officer Seru Soderberg says this because some pipes are 50 years old and need maintenance.

Soderberg says “old infrastructure,” including leaking service pipes, is affecting WAF’s service delivery.

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“Right now, we’re trying to replace our infrastructure. That is where most of our focus is, and then we will progressively put in our redundancy program as we progress with it. Just looking at the data that you have over here at Global Benchmark The Global Benchmark is for every 100km of pipeline. It should be about 13 percent. For the Water Authority of Fiji, we have around 200 bursts for the same 100km of pipelines.”

Soderberg says the number of faults in service pipes is way higher than that of the international benchmarks.

“So basically, our leaking service pipe should have three leaks for every 100 km. We have 300. So basically, what this tells us is that the falls are happening a lot faster than we can actually get to them. It means that we have to look at other avenues of actually rectifying these issues.

WAF is looking at exploring the outsourcing of certain internal mechanisms to improve productivity so they can increase the number of faults they can actually attend to on a daily basis.