JEDDAH, 17 January 2007 — The Jeddah municipality announced yesterday that it has signed a contract with a British consulting company to reclaim the municipal sewage lake and turn it into a forested zone.
Briman Lake, as it is known, is located about 15 km east of the city’s Madinah Ring Road and holds an estimated 15 million cubic meters of untreated sewage. Jamal Abo Imara, head of the media department at the Jeddah municipality, said the project entailed treating the sewage and piping it to a new reservoir where it would be used for agricultural purposes.
City officials would neither name the British consulting firm nor say how much the contract was worth. The municipality is in the process of developing infrastructure that would double the capacity to treat raw sewage. The current infrastructure is incapable of handling the output of raw sewage, leading to storing untreated sewage at Briman and dumping some of it directly into the Red Sea.
The project to increase the municipality’s ability to treat raw sewage entails constructing a 13-km pipeline to deliver the sewage to proposed new facilities. The location of the reservoir has not been established, but will be selected in consultation with the Saudi Geological Society.
The city would like to see Briman and the old dump (recently replaced with a new one at a separate location) reclaimed into forested green zones.
More than 800 tanker trucks a day dump waste into the lake. Jeddah’s sewage is handled by on-site septic systems. The city is currently installing a sewage piping system, but had not yet established precisely when the system will be operational.
The lack of a sewage system results in urban flooding during the occasional downpour. Heavy rains can also cause Briman Lake to overflow, causing a toxic mixture of raw sewage and floodwater to inundate some eastern suburbs.
Briman Lake has also caused some wells to become poisoned due to raw sewage leaking into the aquifer.
