Strategic water storage plan for Jeddah

The National Water Company (NWC) has drawn up a strategic water storage project for Jeddah that will store 1.5 million cubic meters. The project will cost about SR 500 million, business daily Al-Eqtisadiah reported yesterday, quoting the director general of the NWC in Jeddah.
According to Abdullah Al-Assaf, the project would be completed within 24 months once the contractor received the land alloted for the purpose. "This is the first phase of an integrated project for storage of about 6 million cubic meters of water in Jeddah at a cost of more than SR 2.2 billion. The entire project will be completed within 3 to 5 years," he said.
The company said the project was offered to the international and local private sector in a public bidding according to high-quality international specifications and standards.
The company said the first phase of the project would be executed in Briman district with a total capacity of 1.5 million cubic meters of water. It explained the second and third phases of the project would provide 4.5 million cubic meters to bring the total strategic storage of water in the city to 6 million cubic meters.
It said the Briman project would consist of four concrete tanks, each with a capacity of 375,000 cubic meters, with every tank containing three cells with a capacity of 125,000 cubic meters each. "This will bring the total quantity of stored water to 1.5 million cubic meters," NWC said.
The company has already laid pipelines to carry water from desalination plants on the Red Sea to the tanks in Briman.