Amid a crippling drought, the water in Solea reservoir is still under utilised<\/h3>\n
The story of Solea dam, while not exactly a huge scandal, is deeply frustrating, especially in the wake of last week\u2019s audit office report laying out the water situation (more like water crisis) in Cyprus.<\/p>\n
At a time when, according to the report, a total of 48.1 million cubic metres of water was effectively lost between 2021 and 2023 \u2013 a figure including water that was \u2018lost\u2019 to the public purse, i.e. not paid for \u2013 it\u2019s frustrating to discover that there\u2019s a sizeable quantity of water which, due to a combination of factors, is not being properly used.<\/p>\n
The idea of building a dam in the Solea area, taking water from the Karkotis river in the northwestern foothills of Troodos, has been mooted ever since independence. The dam was finally built during the Christofias government, with a capacity of 4.5 million cubic metres \u2013 the 12th-biggest on the island, albeit a long way behind Kouris dam with its 115 million.<\/p>\n
The project was completed in 2013 \u2013 but not entirely completed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll that remained was putting in the network of pipes so [the water] could run to the communities,\u201d Panikos Hambas from the Union of Cypriot Farmers told the Cyprus Mail<\/em>.<\/p>\n The network was installed for one community, the nearby village of Tembria \u2013 then nothing. \u201cFrom that time till today, no government has moved forward on putting in pipes to provide the water in an organised way\u2026. This has created many problems, and wasted a lot of water.\u201d<\/p>\n How could this happen? How could the state spend millions on a project, do the hard work of constructing the dam, then leave out the final bit of connecting it to the communities? What\u2019s the point of 4.5 million cubic metres of water \u2013 in a terrible drought, no less \u2013 if no-one can actually access it?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBecause, my friend, \u2018This is Cyprus\u2019,\u201d says Hambas scathingly. \u201cName me one project that we\u2019ve managed to complete. Just one! We built the dam, we celebrated, \u2018Good for us, we built the dam\u2019 \u2013 then the government that built it left office, and the new one put the brakes on it.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not entirely accurate, Monica Stylianou Andreou, Nicosia district engineer at the water development department, told the Cyprus Mail<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason for the delay is because we\u2019re having trouble with the routing of the pipes,\u201d she explains. The original plan called for a land redistribution scheme, but it fell through \u2013 \u201cso we\u2019ve had to find solutions, passing the pipes through plots of land and along the borders\u201d. This requires the owners\u2019 consent, which is partly why it\u2019s taken so long.<\/p>\n Locals admit this is true \u2013 but also point out that the hold-up isn\u2019t because they\u2019ve been refusing to give their consent. Rather, they claim, it\u2019s because it took several years even for consent forms to be sent to them.<\/p>\n In any case, says Stylianou Andreou, it\u2019s not like the water is being wasted.<\/p>\n \u201cThe water is being used \u2013 just not in the way it was originally planned. In other words, the permanent solution hasn\u2019t been completed yet.\u201d<\/p>\n To the government\u2019s credit, it did come up with a temporary solution. In 2017 \u2013 after four years of the dam just sitting there \u2013 an arrangement was made to supply water, using existing irrigation ditches, to the area\u2019s irrigation divisions, which would then channel it to farmers and extract payment.<\/p>\n There were (and are) two issues with this solution. The first is that ditches aren\u2019t as efficient as water pipes would be.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a ditch two kilometres outside the village,\u201d Leontios Leontiou from the irrigation division of Evrychou told the Cyprus Mail<\/em>, \u201cand the water comes to the village\u2026 About half of it gets lost, let\u2019s say.\u201d<\/p>\n The other, more important issue is that irrigation divisions are quite makeshift organisations, with limited duties. According to one farmer, his only previous contact with his local division was paying them \u20ac10 a month to clean out the irrigation ditches. They\u2019re not really official bodies with power to impose wide-ranging sanctions.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter all,\u201d says Giorgos Kallouris from Linopsas, the irrigation division of the village of Linou, \u201cwhy should I be doing the job of the water development department, and selling water?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just a farmer. I only joined the irrigation division because my crops were about to dry up \u2013 and I got into that whole mess, that whole hassle, having to supply water to everyone else too\u2026 Am I a government employee?\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a complicating factor in that very few professional farmers \u2013 only about a dozen \u2013 actually work in the area. Most plots are owned by people who live in the city, and use their fields (which they\u2019ve mostly inherited) for olive or citrus groves. They\u2019re bound to be less attached to the land than farmers who need it for their livelihood.<\/p>\n What exactly happened, and where the blame lies, is up for debate. Some producers used too much water, and neglected to pay. (After all, it was just a \u2018temporary\u2019 solution.) Those in charge of irrigation divisions didn\u2019t press the case, or didn\u2019t want to play policeman. The government, too, could\u2019ve been more proactive, letting the situation escalate.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is actually a surprisingly common problem, albeit made worse by the circumstances here. The audit office report found that 29.35 per cent of Cyprus\u2019 water supply is supplied but not metred, therefore not paid for.<\/p>\n The water from Solea dam was certainly not metred, since the pipes hadn\u2019t even been installed yet. There also seems to have been a general feeling that, since the state had neglected its obligations, land owners were justified in neglecting their own.<\/p>\n The upshot, after several years, was that locals owed thousands of euros \u2013 more than they could reasonably pay \u2013 in water dues. The government took them to court, and cut off the water supply in cases where the court found against them. At the moment, 12 years after Solea dam was built, some nearby villages (though not Linou or Evrychou) can\u2019t access even a drop from it.<\/p>\n Both sides bear some responsibility, admits Hambas.<\/p>\n Still, he believes, the source of the trouble is that the dam wasn\u2019t finished back in the day, forcing the adoption of wasteful and flawed back-up plans instead of the \u201corganised irrigation network\u201d which would\u2019ve solved all the problems.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, having now obtained the owners\u2019 consent for routing the pipes, the water development department is moving ahead with the third and final phase of the project, namely distributing the water to individual plots \u2013 though, due to lack of funds, the relevant study will be done by the private sector.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re about to seek tenders for the study of the rest of the project,\u201d says Stylianou Andreou, after which the competitive process to find a contractor will be carried out as soon as possible.<\/p>\n \u201cThe minister \u2013 when we saw her in the past year \u2013 promised that the Solea dam would be a priority,\u201d Athina Georgiou, president of Linou community council, told the Cyprus Mail<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s quite encouraging. Then again, building a dam in Solea has been a priority for several decades now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amid a crippling drought, the water in Solea reservoir is still under utilised The story of Solea dam, while not exactly a huge scandal, is deeply frustrating, especially in the wake of last week\u2019s audit office report laying out the water situation (more like water crisis) in Cyprus. At a time when, according to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1720,626,701,1721],"class_list":{"0":"post-5044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cyprus-news","8":"tag-dam","9":"tag-full","10":"tag-waste","11":"tag-water"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}