Slight decrease: The water level at the Air Itam Dam has dipped by 0.4% to 32.4% on Friday. —ZHAFARAN NASIB/The Star
GEORGE TOWN: The amount of water for use from the Air Itam Dam only went down by 0.4% during peak usage over an 11-day period including Chinese New Year, says the Penang Water Supply Corporation (PBAPP).
Its chief executive officer K. Pathmanathan said the effectiveness of the Air Itam Dam Action Plan had allowed PBAPP to maintain the dam’s effective capacity until the next rainy season.
The dam’s effective capacity was hovering at 32.8% on Feb 5 and only went down to 32.4% over the 11-day period, he said in a statement yesterday.
Pathmanathan said PBAPP had implemented four key water supply engineering contingency measures under the plan.
These include minimising raw water drawdown from the Air Itam Dam to the Air Itam water treatment plant (WTP) by 75% daily from 44 million litres per day (MLD) to 11MLD and optimising raw water intake from the main intake and two other raw water resources for the Air Itam WTP at a rate of 6MLD.
He added that treated water production at the Air Itam WTP was reduced by about 66%, from 50MLD to 17MLD.
The last measure was to pump 33MLD of treated water from the Sungai Dua WTP to make up for the shortfall in the treated water output from the Air Itam WTP.
“The river level of Sungai Muda was relatively healthy at 2.02m on Feb 16. The (effective) capacities of the Muda and Beris dams that release water into Sungai Muda are 74.8% and 100%, respectively,” Pathmanathan said.
He said barring mishaps, PBAPP should be able to safely sustain its contingency measure for the next 30 to 60 days.
On cloud-seeding operations, he said PBAPP was awaiting feedback from the National Water Services Commission.
