IRIN Focus on the restoration of basic services

All but a few of Liberia’s 2.6 million people are forced to do without running water and have no electricity in their homes. Things were not always this way. The capital, Monrovia, used to be considered one of Africa’s bright spots, but civil war (1989-1997) and the vandalism that accompanied it destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including installations of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation (LWSC) and the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC). Only one of two pumping units at the LWSC’s treatment facility at White Plains, some 30 km north of Monrovia, functions. As a result, the corporation can only supply water through a small-bore pipe (41 cm in diameter) to Monrovia’s Bushrod Island suburb, where the capital’s light industries and small businesses are located. “We are running only about ten hours a day,” Kowoyan Kpakolo, the LWSC’s deputy managing director of technical services, told IRIN in early July. The utility uses tankers to deliver water from wells and boreholes to the rest of the city under a US $4-million project funded by the European Union (EU) and managed by the Italian NGO, Geoscience. Before the war, the LWSC provided the city with 273 million to 365 million litres of water a day. Today, it only manages to supply between 6.8 million litres and 8.2 million litres. Tankers provided by the EU carry water from two boreholes and over 300 shallow wells to five overhead tanks, each of which can hold 55 million litres. Each day, streams of people carrying containers on their heads or in wheelbarrows queue up at these depositories. But this falls far short of their needs. An average household of eight requires about 180 to 270 litres of water a day for bathing, washing, cooking and drinking, Kpakolo said. Wealthier residents have water brought to them Hotels, other businesses and some wealthier city residents pay to have tankers deliver water to holding tanks on their sites. However, few people can afford to do so. The roughly 4,500 litres each tanker holds costs US $20, twice as much as the monthly salary of a university graduate. Even these deliveries are threatened. The EU-funded programme - which includes supplies of chemicals, fuel and maintenance equipment and pumps - expires at the end of September. What happens then remains uncertain. “I personally don’t even want to think about that,” Kpakolo said. The LWSC has announced that it will stop trucking water to residences and businesses on 31 July. Private companies are expected to make the deliveries after that but they face a daunting challenge. Even if the city’s population had remained at the pre-war level of 450,000 it would have been a tall order. Now it has topped one million, many of them people who fled the countryside for Monrovia during the war because the city provided the safest haven from rival factions. The rapid increase in the capital’s population strained social services and forced the corporation to sink wells across town. Developing other water sources Now, the LWSC wants to tap more of Monrovia’s ground water and thus reduce its dependence on the river St. Paul, which flows through the capital. The plan is to sink a series of boreholes in the suburb of Paynesville, which has ample deposits of water, and interconnect them to supply the city. The LWSC says it has applied for Danish aid to build reservoirs in the country, which has none. Taiwan has given US $700,000 to support a US $2.5-million EU grant to rehabilitate a 94-cm-bore pipe that used to supply central Monrovia, but was damaged. The damaged portion has been repaired, and so has a treatment plant, but not much work has been done on the filters because spare parts are scarce and the EU money is running out. “If we had the required money and equipment here, it would take three months to supply each home with pipe-borne water,” Kpakolo said. Treating raw sewage Monrovia’s sewerage treatment plant in the suburb of Fiamah, designed to handle 27.3 million litres a day, has also been affected by the war and vandalism. As a result, raw sewerage is pumped directly into the sea. According to Kpakolo, the sewage often remained stuck because there was not enough water to flush out the pipes through which it flowed. Now “the corporation has two old vacuum trucks that suck up the sewerage for dumping in an open lagoon near the treatment plant,” he said. “We rely on natural treatment, in the open air.” The vacuum trucks have reduced sewage overflows onto the streets, and thereby the risk of diseases, but the city needs a completely new sewer system and that would cost at least US $50 million, Kpakolo said, adding: “The government does not have the money to do this.” Lights still dim in Monrovia Nor is there much money available for the state-owned power utility, the LEC. In November 1999, then Vice-President Enoch Dogolea (now late) promised to restore full electricity to Monrovia by Christmas Eve. Eight months on, only a short stretch of road on Bushrod Island has street lights and, one city resident told IRIN on 1 July, “these lights only came on about a week ago”. The rest of Monrovia is in darkness. So is the entire 64-km road from Roberts International Airport to downtown Monrovia, lined by light poles whose bulbs were ripped off by looters. The LEC’s hydroelectric plant at Mount Coffee, some 25 km northeast of Monrovia, was put out of commission during the war. It once powered the nation. Now it stands idle, stripped of its moveable parts, its generators and switchgear damaged. LEC’s deputy managing director for planning and technical services, Archie Sawyer, told IRIN the plant and other facilities suffered less from the fighting than from the vandals, who looted relay stations, broke wooden poles and gutted conductors for the aluminum they contained. Electricity system needs US $107 million Repairing the entire electricity generation and distribution system would require US $107.7 million over five years, according to the LEC’s estimates. In the meantime, the corporation is limited to a US $5.4-million start-up project to get lights flickering again in the city. The LEC says it hopes to jumpstart its power-supply efforts through “a minimum but reliable new diesel-based generating capacity and a small and efficient distribution network and commercial system”. It has just started to increase electricity capacity by rehabilitating diesel-run thermal units at its Bushrod Island and Luke power plants using five Czech-built generators bought with a US $2-million Taiwanese grant. The immediate aim is to restore power to homes and factories on Bushrod Island, the adjacent neighbourhood of Virginia and central Monrovia by getting the thermal plants working at 70 percent of generation capacity. This would guarantee an uninterrupted supply to less than a third of the city. “Until we get additional capacity by rehabilitating the other units, then expand to other parts of the city, we’ll be concentrating on Bushrod Island and central Monrovia,” Sawyer said. Switching from 110 to 220 volts The LEC needs US $6 million to US $8 million to repair and expand the distribution networks. It has begun retrieving workable distribution units from other parts of the city and installing them at Bushrod, LEC’s deputy managing director operations, Alfred Jallah, told IRIN. Now that it has to rebuild almost from scratch, Liberia is using the opportunity to switch from the American 110-volt system to 220 volts transmitted at a frequency of 50 hz (Hertz), as in most other parts of the world. “This will allow for interconnectivity with the electricity grids of other countries in the subregion,” Jallah said. Consumers must now begin converting their household appliances and industrial units to accommodate the power change, which is likely to prove costly to industries. LEC says that in three to five years time, it should have completely rehabilitated and upgraded the Mount Coffee Hydro facility and switched to 220 volts. It will also have completed the links from the hydro station to the Bushrod and Paynesville substations. In the meantime, Liberians wait to enjoy the electricity, water and other services which people elsewhere take for granted. A slogan on the rear bumper of a Monrovia yellow cab appeared to sum up the general mood. “Hard times, High hopes,” it read.