Signing an agreement to construct a desalination plant at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, funded with $420,000 by Human Appeal UK.
Coastal Municipalities Water Utility and Human Appeal Sign an Agreement to Construct a Desalination Plant at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza
CMWU and Human Appeal signed an agreement to construct a desalination plant at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, funded at $420,000, with the agreement signed by Dr. Majed Awni Abu Ramadan, Chairman of CMWU's Board of Directors, and Dr. Wael Abdel-Aal, Director of Human Appeal's Gaza office.
This project comes within the projects implemented by CMWU in cooperation with Human Appeal to improve water services and supplies in the Gaza Strip, with a water well previously drilled and constructed in the Wadi Al-Salqa area.
Dr. Majed Abu Ramadan welcomed this agreement, which works to rehabilitate Al-Shifa Hospital's infrastructure by providing clean, healthy water to help all departments use this water safely, expressing his happiness at the joint cooperation between CMWU and Human Appeal.
Dr. Wael Abdel-Aal, Director of Human Appeal's Gaza office, explained that this project is based on a donation campaign launched by Human Appeal UK to fund this humanitarian project, which received great response from donors, noting that water projects in cooperation with CMWU are successful projects serving large segments of the Palestinian people.
For his part, Eng. Monther Shoblaq, the Utility's Director-General, affirmed that the desalination plant project at Al-Shifa Hospital includes building and installing a desalination plant to improve the quality and quantity of water supplied to the hospital, due to the high salinity rate that negatively affects most of the medical equipment used in the hospital, especially the dialysis unit department, and comes in the context of CMWU's continued support for Al-Shifa Hospital in order to secure the hospital's needs for water suitable for the different departments' uses, and it is the second plant to be installed at Al-Shifa Hospital during the last three years, preceded by the installation of a desalination unit for the dialysis department.
Shoblaq indicated that work on the project will begin in October 2015, with the project including modifying one of the existing water wells, installing a complete wellhead, and building and installing a water pump to distribute it to the hospital's water distribution network.
The plant's production capacity is expected to reach 100 cubic meters per day, but with the hospital's growing needs, CMWU proposed adding 500 cubic meters daily.
It is noted that all areas of the Gaza Strip suffer from a high salinity rate in well water, requiring intervention by drilling new water wells or constructing small desalination plants to provide drinking water of acceptable quality and appropriate quantities.
