RAKWA is the RAK wastewater agency responsible for designing, building, operating, and maintaining all the public wastewater systems.
Ras Al Khaimah—known as RAK—is the northernmost of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It has a population of about 350,000. It is known for its biodiversity with beaches and mountains.
The new dedicated controls have “improved the efficiency in terms of the performance of the pump and the energy consumption. And it means the pumps are actually living longer, which is reducing the cost for maintenance, as well as the downtime of the assets,” says Walid Abdelrahman.
RAKWA was challenged on several fronts and wanted to remedy them. Some of these were:
“Given how young an organization we are, we’ve obviously had our teething problems,” says Abdul Qadir Malik, Head of Capital Project Delivery, RAKWA. “One of them was the poor execution of the way the systems were put in. It has resulted in our systems being misaligned, which has led to outside water infiltrating into our systems. This leads to higher electricity costs, higher operational costs, and this leads to a more strained tariff.” Because the system was operated manually, all 13 pumping and lifting stations had to be visited at least once every four hours, says Walid Abdelrahman, RAKWA’s O&M Department Manager. Something had to change.
