Clean water restored to most of the capital

Piped water in the Tajik capital Dushanbe can now be consumed after boiling, following floods and landslides in the country in July that left more than half of the city's population without access to safe drinking water. But infrastructure such as bridges and roads in the rest of Tajikistan remains damaged, according to humanitarian workers. "The water is back to normal," Johannes Chudoba, head of the UN Coordination Unit (UNCU), told IRIN from Dushanbe, noting that the authorities had assured the public that it was safe to drink tap water after boiling it. However, the mayor of Dushanbe, Markhmadasaid Ubaydullayev, recently stated that water from the Varzob river, a major source for the Tajik capital, was not suitable for human consumption in the long term and announced plans to supply all the city with water from artesian wells in the southern suburbs, according to the UNCU official. Currently, just a third of the capital's southern outskirts are provided with drinking water from artesian wells. Cecile Pichon, Tajikistan representative of the European Commission Humanitarian Office (ECHO), told IRIN that even if the water situation had improved in the capital, it had never been of good quality there and "it still becomes dirty sometimes". She remarked that there was much work to do to rehabilitate infrastructure across the country. "There is a lot of infrastructure in the country to rehabilitate," the ECHO official said, highlighting the reconstruction work being done by CARE International with communities in the northern Varzob district, the most affected area. She stressed that even though the water supply infrastructure in the capital had not been damaged it needed to be completely replaced as it was very old. In mid July, floods and landslides caused by torrential rains left roughly 400,000 people, out of the capital's total population of 600,000, without access to safe water. Bridges across the country were destroyed, hundreds of families lost their houses and the only roads linking Dushanbe with the north and south of the country became impassable. Chudoba noted that the government, under the leadership of the Emergency Ministry, was very effective at supplying rapid short-term solutions, especially temporarily repairing the main roads. But he stressed that long term solutions were needed. "The cost of a long term sustainable solution, that is of proper repairs to the infrastructure, will be enormous." The potential outbreak of waterborne diseases among Dushanbe's inhabitants remained a cause of major concern, given that delivery of clean water by truck was very difficult. "Nonetheless, the health situation [in Dushanbe] is rather stable at the moment," Pichon asserted, explaining that ECHO was focusing its programmes on distributing drugs to hospitals, awareness raising activities and monitoring the quality of water. The number of registered typhoid cases, an often fatal disease caused by consumption of contaminated drink or food, has reached 184 so far this year in Dushanbe, compared to 275 last year, according to Ministry of Health sources quoted by Avesta news agency. In addition, last year 293 people were affected by dysentery in the capital, compared to 58 so far this year. The UNCU official noted that the number of infected people was not out of line for this time of the year. But he stressed that water chlorination was still vital and maintained that whenever it was interrupted there was an immediate rise in waterborne diseases. "The turbidity [amount of mud in the water] has gone down far enough for chlorination to be effective again," he added. While Dushanbevodokanal, the capital's water supply agency, was carrying out chlorination activities with the support of a World Bank's project, the Ministry of Health's sanitary and epidemiological services, supported by the United Nation's Children Fund (UNICEF) and together with Red Crescent Society of Tajikistan (RCST), were monitoring the state of water in critical parts of the capital. The economic consequences of the floods and landslides for the mountainous country, the poorest among the Central Asian states, are expected to be severe with harvests affected and livestock killed. "In this critical period of the year, when the harvest is brought in and stocks are established for the winter, to have the main [road] connection between the country's principal cities closed was a severe blow," Chudoba said.