Egypt: Potable water for Egyptian villages

ROOTS^TM BLOWERS, MANUFACTURED by Dresser, Inc., a leader in providing highly engineered products for global infrastructure projects, have been specified for a project that is making potable water available to villages in Upper Egypt where it is desperately needed.

The project deploys portable, turnkey water treatment plants to rural villages to purify local water and prevent outbreaks of waterborne illnesses. Typically these plants produce 100 m3 (approximately 26,500 gallons) of clean water per hour.

The Dresser Roots Egyptian distributor, Tartoussieh Engineering of Cairo, supplied 249 of the ROOTS Universal RAI® blower packages to the three contractors - Veolia, Pharoahs Engineering and Aircraft Factory Helwan - who were selected to provide the water treatment plants. ROOTS blowers were chosen for the project because of their rugged construction and flexible configuration to meet a wide variety of installation specifications.
"ROOTS blowers are very durable and dependable, which makes them ideal for a project when a round-the-clock effort is required to supply people with a basic necessity such as clean water," said Mohyi Tartoussieh, sales manager for Tartoussieh Engineering.

Supplying clean water to its citizenry is a high priority and an ongoing challenge for the Egyptian government. The Nile River provides an estimated 97 per cent of the renewable water resources in Egypt.
Yet it is subject to pollution by run-off from industrial waste and sewage, the latter because sanitary sewage treatment capacity has not kept pace with the country's population growth. Conventional water purification processes have sometimes proved inadequate when chlorination treatment has interacted with some of the pollutants and created additional health hazards.

The potable water treatment plants are part of a larger, E£1.3 billion (US$240mn) initiative by the Egyptian government, with support from the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the National Organization for Potable Water & Sanitary Drainage. The goal of this environmental initiative is to provide safe drinking water and expand the capacity of the country's sanitary sewage treatment infrastructure.