Malaysia: Water woes far from over - experts

patrick lee The Star 6 May 14;

PETALING JAYA: Water supply woes are far from over although rationing has been called off.

Experts have warned that water crises in the Klang Valley may be the norm until the completion of the Langat 2 treatment plant in Selangor.

S. Piarapakaran, president of the Association of Water Energy Re­­­search (Awer) said Selangor’s water treatment reserve margin was too low to guarantee constant flow during dry seasons or unexpected plant shutdowns.

Periodic spike in demand would also occur during major festivals.

“In the water services industry, you must have (a comfortable) reserve margin after you meet daily demands … if anything were to happen, we’d be able to face it,” he said.

He added that an ideal treatment reserve margin would be 20% – roughly 928 million litres a day (MLD) – instead of the current one of less than 3%.

Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor (Syabas) maintains that there is no more reserve margin.

The 20% reserve could possibly be achieved should the Langat 2 water treatment plant – capable of supplying 1,130MLD – be completed this year.

Piarapakaran argued that blaming the dry weather in the first few months of the year was not the way to go forward.

“The possibility of this (water crisis) occurring every year is quite high,” he said.

Malaysian Water Association (MWA) president Syed Mohamed Adnan Alhabshi said factors such as high usage and large non-revenue water (NRW) figures also added to the problem.

He said the average Malaysian used 212 litres of water a day and that low tariffs (or in some cases, no tarrifs, i.e. free water) were not going to encourage people to save water.

“If the per-capita usage is not going to drop, we have to focus on NRW,” he said.

NRW is made up of four components: leakages and overflows, theft, meter under-registration and unbilled authorised usage such as for firefighting and flushing of mains pipelines.

Selangor defends lifting of water rationing
a ruban The Star 5 May 14;

SHAH ALAM: The Selangor government has again defended its decision to end the water rationing exercise, saying that prior studies were carried out before doing so.

Executive councillor for infrastructure, Dr Yunus Hairi, said the state was confident of the measures it took to address the problem.

"Among the state's plans is to pump water from nearby ponds into the Sungai Selangor dam and through this, the water distribution from the dam will be more efficient," he said in a statement issued Monday.

He cited efforts to seek the help of the Thai government in using cloud-seeding technology to harvest rain at the dam.

These were among the reasons why the state had decided to call off the rationing that has been troubling over a million consumers, he said.

Yunus was commenting on a statement by Association of Water and Energy Research Malaysia president S. Piarapakaran that the state was gambling on the fate of the people by lifting the rationing despite the water level at the Sungai Selangor dam not reaching the 55% mark.

"He (Piarapakaran) should look into the efforts of the state government in handling the water crisis to get a better understanding," he said.

Piarapakaran was quoted in a Malay daily as saying that the state's efforts in addressing the water crisis such as the use of membrane technology was irrelevant.