New sewage plant for Portimao still may not cope

 Águas do Algarve has at last launched a tender for a new water treatment plant to serve the citizens of the Portimão municipal area but already the planned size of the plant has been criticised as too small to cope.

The announcement of the launch of the tender for the design and construction of the new Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) at Companheira in Portimão was published yesterday in the Official Gazette.

The tender for the work to be commissioned by Águas do Algarve SA is based on a budgeted price of €12 million for the design and the construction of the new treatment plant.

Teresa Fernandes, spokesperson for Águas do Algarve said that it is expected that the work will be awarded in July 2014.

Worryingly, Portimão Câmara and the Empresa Municipal de Águas e Resíduos (EMARP) both have 'serious doubts' that the planned treatment plant will cope even with the current level of effluent.

João Rosa, the head of EMARP said in an interview with Sul Informaçao today that the council and EMARP, did not know if the planned plant will have facilities for the tertiary treatment of wastewater, enabling the reuse of water for irrigation, and to sort out the smell to end the stench that plagues locals day in, day out, especially the villagers of Companheira.

"We have asked Águas do Algarve for this information but nothing has been divulged. We are directly involved in this process, but it never sent us anything except a technical note which says nothing concrete about what will be done there," according to Rosa.

Águas do Algarve Spokeswoman Teresa Fernandes assured the public that the future project will include odour treatment and tertiary treatment, allowing a much better quality effluent that can be used for the irrigation of green spaces, including gardens and golf courses.

The replacement of the current treatment plant at Companheira, which is smelly and bursting at the seams, especially since it started to receive wastewater from the neighboring municipalities of Lagoa and Monchique, has been on the drawing board since at least since 2004.

Back then the project was designed for 200,000 inhabitants in Portimão, Lagoa and Portimão, and initially wanted to receive the waste from Monchique’s pig farms, a plan that was soon abandoned due the unsustainable costs or treating the powerful porcine effluent.

Águas do Algarve launched a tender in 2011 for the construction of a new inter-municipal treatment plant to serve the counties of Portimão, Lagoa and Portimão which was to budgeted to cost €20 million, but this tender was cancelled.

According to Teresa Fernandes, the lower budget of €12 million for the new plant is mainly due to the fact that the estimated of the population to be served was 200,000 which the water company now reckons to be too high and suggest a figure of 140,000 people.  Is this a sensible saving…?

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