The residents of the city will have to deal with water shortage for two more days with the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) shutting down the operations two of its pumping stations for 48 hours.
The pumping stations at Mavoor and Kuttikkattoor, that cater mainly to the city areas, will be shut down to replace two faulty pumps that had been causing disruption in water supply in the past few weeks.
The motors at these stations were damaged a few weeks ago and the pumping was done using standby motors. Incidentally, one of the three pumps of these standby units at both the stations got damaged recently making it difficult to maintain regular water supply at all parts of the city. As of now, the KWA supplies water in the city on alternate days.
Spare parts unavailableAssistant Executive Engineer, KWA, Malapparamba, Hussian Kutty said that the regular motors at the two pumping stations were damaged and would take months to be repaired as spare parts were not available.
With one of the three pumps in the standby units too in disorder, the pumping was not powerful enough to reach water to high-lying areas. Hence the water supply was partial on Monday and Tuesday.
The stations were shut down at 9 p.m. on Tuesday and regular supply would resume on Friday.
JICA pumpsSince repairing the pumps immediately was out of question due to technical reasons, the faulty ones would be replaced by two pumps that had been procured under the JICA drinking water project, Mr. Hussain Kutty said.
He said that most of the motors in the pumping stations in the district were around 20 years old and needed to be replaced. He said that a project was under way and soon the city would have uninterrupted water supply.