Almada’s Municipal Water and Sanitation Services (SMAS) have stepped up inspection actions to ensure a “responsible use” of water and identified, in recent days, “several points with significant losses”, it was announced yesterday.
“In the actions carried out in the last few days, several points with significant water losses were identified, triggering immediate interventions that allowed detecting and eliminating irregular connections to the public network, some intended to supply irrigation systems,” reads a note published on the municipal services’ site in the Setúbal district.
“The interventions involved excavation and drainage works, restoring the operating conditions of the infrastructure and eliminating wasteful situations.”
SMAS explained that the inspection operations promoted in the last few days aim to “promote the responsible use of water, protect the public supply network, prevent losses and detect irregular situations that could compromise the efficiency of the system.”
The municipal services noted, however, that most inspections “have allowed confirming the regularity of connections and noting that the vast majority of users are complying with the measures in force and using water responsibly.”
It was also reported that “large water consumers” in the municipality were inspected, through inspections of technical boxes, valves and connection points to the public network.
“These checks allowed identifying situations that enabled unrecorded consumption, with all irregular connections detected having been immediately closed and sealed, preventing the continuation of improper uses of the public water network,” they added.
On Saturday, SMAS announced that the average water reserves in Almada stood at 40%.
The monitoring scale used comprises five levels, where level 1 (red) corresponds to reserves below 20%, level 2 (orange) to values between 20% and 30%, level 3 (yellow) between 30% and 50%, level 4 (green) between 50% and 75%, and level 5 (blue) to reserves above 75%.
Since the beginning of the month there have been water supply failures in the municipality of Almada, with particular impact on Costa da Caparica, with the city council declaring a state of alert.
Among the measures defined by the local authority are the total cut of supply in certain zones of the municipality and the prohibition of all uses of water from the public network that do not correspond to domestic or essential uses.
To minimize the impact of the water shortage in the municipality, particularly in the Costa da Caparica area, the Almada City Council has already managed to reinforce the water supply to the municipality with two new boreholes, which are injecting into the public network an additional 120 cubic meters of water per hour.
