XN000022-1995-07-18 — Page 13

12 -

Muk Wu 'C' pumping station opens

The $234 million Muk Wu 'C' pumping station is at the forefront of a scheme to increase water supply from the East River to meet Hong Kong's demand now and in the future, the Secretary for Works, Mr James Blake, said this (Tuesday) morning.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the station, Mr Blake added that the station had built-in provision for additional pumpsets to meet Hong Kong's demand well into the next century.

"The project is a complex piece of civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, of which much is unseen, being effectively buried under the landscaping.

"Its facilities have had to be engineered to harmonise with the existing 'A' and 'B' pumping stations, and with major interconnections carried out without disruption to the normal reception and transfer of water from Guangdong," Mr Blake said.

In order to safeguard those installations, he said, a concurrent scheme had been implemented to provide flood protection.

"This is highly evident by the obvious presence of substantial concrete walls around each station, each with entrances protected by removable stop-logs, and the areas and buildings within further protected by automatic, pumped dewatering systems," he added.

Mr Blake noted that water demand had grown by over 800 per cent in the past three decades since 1960, when water was first imported from the Shenzhen Reservoir to serve a population of three million consuming 0.279 million cubic metres of water per day, to the present day of six million people consuming 2.56 million cubic metres per day.

The Muk Wu 'C' pumping station is the second largest raw water pumping station ever built in Hong Kong, and together with the 'A' and 'B' stations, the complex has a total capacity of 3.963 million cubic metres per day and handles the water supply from Guangdong which amounts to about 70 per cent of Hong Kong's daily supply.

The Director of Water Supplies, Mr Hu Man-shui, said at the opening that the station was designed to receive and distribute, ultimately in conjunction with the existing 'A' and 'B' stations, 1,100 million cubic metres of water from Guangdong annually.