East zone concessionaire Manila Water Company Inc. recently signed a contract for the P5.3-billion Novaliches-Balara Aqueduct 4 Project.
Manila Water said in a statement the project, one of the largest water supply infrastructure undertaken by Manila Water, entails the construction of a fourth aqueduct from the La Mesa Reservoir to the Balara Treatment Plants (BTP) 1 and 2 to improve the reliability and security of the raw water transmission system.
Representatives of Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, Manila Water, Arup as project management consultant, and NOVABALA joint venture, the project’s design and build contractor composed of CMC di Ravenna (Italy), First Balfour Inc. (Philippines) and Chun Wo Engineering (Hong Kong), joined in the contract signing ceremony
MWSS administrator Reynaldo Velasco said the project was part of the agency’s water security program under the new administration..
“Part of this is coming up with interim and long-term water source projects to approximate at least 4,000 million liters per day (MLD) in the next 10 or 25 or, hopefully, 50 years,” Velasco said.
The three existing aqueducts, built in 1929, 1956 and 1968 respectively, are already nearing, if not already exceeding, the service life of 50 years and are in need of assessment and rehabilitation.
The existing aqueduct system transmits 1,600 million liters per day of raw water to BTP.
The NBAQ4 project will provide a new aqueduct to enable the sequential temporary service suspension of the existing aqueducts for inspection, assessment and subsequent rehabilitation.
The 7.30-km long and 3.10-m diameter NBAQ4, which is one of the first tunnels to be constructed with a tunnel boring machine in Metro Manila, is composed of a new intake facility at La Mesa, an underground aqueduct and an outlet facility at BTP.
The fourth aqueduct will have a capacity of 1,000 MLD and will be constructed along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City. Upon completion, the project will also provide emergency redundancy in the event of a failure in any of the existing aqueducts.
