Thiruvananthapuram: A 110mm pipe of the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) at Ambalamukku leak leaked on Thursday affecting water supply to Pattom and Muttada areas in the city. Traffic on the Ambalamukku-Muttada road was disrupted for some hours in the morning as a result. The leak was reported at around 9 am when a JCB used for KWA maintenance work, damaged the pipeline. An official at the KWA North Division said that though a large quantity of water was lost, it could not be termed a major leak as it was not in the main line.
The leak did not affect major areas of the city. One of the lines used to connect the main pipeline with a newly laid down pipeline under the JNNURM scheme was affected. The leak occurred near the chamber with connections from the main pipeline with that of the JNNURM pipeline, said the official.
A KWA repair team began work soon after the leak was detected. The work was completed in the evening and water supply was restored, KWA officials said. Efforts in the morning were to find out whether the burst had affected the 900-mm pre-stressed concrete (PSC) transmission pipe which ran close to the pipe line. However, it was confirmed that the 900-mm PSC pipe was intact. Ambalamukku-Muttada stretch has been witnessing frequent pipe bursts.
The pipe burst has also been damaging road leaving it in a dilapidated condition. However, most of the pipe bursts had been occurring in the 900 mm main PSC pipeline. Sources said that this was because the pipeline was more than 40 years old and was finding hard to cope with the high pressure. This was the reason why the KWA had taken up a project to replace the existing line with a parallel new line. After the pipe laying was completed, old line would be replaced by the new line. However, the present leak occurred at the line used for connecting the old line with the new line.
