RIYADH, 4 May — Water truck owners are exploiting the current crisis in Riyadh caused by the closure of pipelines that pump drinking water to the city from the Eastern Province.
The two pipelines were shut after fissures appeared in them leading to heavy leakage that reduced water supply to the city by 30 percent.
Truck owners are charging from SR400 to SR500 for a tanker depending on its size. Before the crisis, the prices ranged between SR120 and SR200.
As an emergency measure, the Water and Sewage Department has opened an additional supply center to ease pressure on the city’s seven centers that distribute water using the trucks. The department has also instructed the distribution contractors, who operate a combined fleet of 160 trucks to sell water at the rate of SR6 per cubic meter.
The city consumes a daily average of 1.2 million cubic meters of water.
The department urged the contractors, who employ 182 drivers, to appoint more drivers. The department also appealed to the Passports authorities to allow drivers of other companies in water trucks until the crisis was over.
Meanwhile, the department complained to the ministries of Commerce and Municipal and Rural Affairs about the private trucks that demand exorbitant prices for water.
An official source at the Saline Water Conversion Corporation, however, attributed the water shortage to the changing of two couplings in the main lines supplying water to the city.
Khaled Al-Muneefi, director of public and industrial relations at the SWCC, said, “The main pipes supplying water from Jubail did not break at all.”
The volume of pumped water reduced by 30 percent when the some of the lines were closed for repair. He said the repair work will be completed by next Monday.
But the water department reiterated its earlier statements that the water shortage was the result of fissures in two pipelines of the SWCC.
Workers at the Souk Al-Jimal in Al-Janadriya, east of Riyadh, where one of the leaks was discovered, said two pipes were functioning while two others were being repaired. One of the pipes will be ready to pump water in three days, they said.
