The Municipality of Lagoa completed the first work carried out with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), in a total amount of 600 thousand euros. The work will make it possible to monitor the water supply, avoiding losses and reducing the volume of water.
According to the municipality, this is «a pilot system that the Municipality of Lagoa intends to extend to the entire municipality, ensuring the reduction of losses of drinking water».
This intervention, included in the Algarve's Regional Water Efficiency Plan, was prioritized in Component C9 – Water Management of the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Funds from the PRR made it possible to intervene in the subsystem of the zone of influence of the Águas do Algarve delivery point, that is, in the Alporchinhos Reservoir.
The operation included, as a structural element, the replacement/renovation of ducts and the creation of 11 Measurement and Control Zones (ZMC), «essential to the network control process».
It also aimed at technological reinforcement of the existing command center for monitoring flows, with facilities for diagnosing excessive consumption or problems in the distribution network.
«The set of interventions contemplated in this endeavor contributes to the reduction of occurrences of failures in the supply, reduction of the volume of unbilled water, reduction of the volume of real and apparent losses of water, reduction of the volume of water imported by the system and for the alteration quality assessment of relevant ERSAR indicators», underlines the Câmara de Lagoa.
The municipality explains that «the control of water losses is essential to improve the efficiency of the supply networks, guaranteeing long-term environmental and social sustainability. The approach to the problem of losses has as its core component the sectorization of the supply network».
The sectorization of the network, “although it does not directly incorporate loss control itself, is essential to know the spatial distribution of real losses. It thus constitutes the starting point for the application of other methods, namely the management of pressures and techniques for locating and repairing leaks».
Once the installation of this pilot system has been completed, the Municipality of Lagoa also announced that it is preparing «a new application to the PRR to start phase-II of the replacement/renovation of ducts and the creation of a ZMC that will allow the municipality to replicate the intervention carried out in the parish of Porches».
«Saving water is our first priority and, in this first year and a half of this mandate, we have shown that we are very committed to implementing measures that allow us to reduce water losses. There is a lot of work to be done, but the strategy is defined and we have to take advantage of this window of opportunity that is the PRR», said Luís Encarnação, mayor of Lagoa.
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