THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Under pressure for not being able to tackle the shortage of water supply to elevated areas in the city, the Kerala Water Authority (KA) is now preparing to inspect two valve chambers in the pipelines leading to Jawahar Nagar and Kanaka Nagar.

The KWA has all along maintained that the repeated power outages at Aruvikkara and the resultant disruptions in the pumping of water are at the root of the water shortage to the elevated areas in the city. Now that there has been no major power supply disruption over the past 48 hours and the elevated areas still continue to face shortage of water, the KWA has been constrained to look into other possible reasons for this problem.

Engineers of the KWA now say that they are stymied in their efforts to check the valve chambers as they have been buried underground following the resurfacing of the Kowdiar-Vellayambalam stretch of the road carried out by Thiruvananthapuram Road Development Company Ltd. (TRCL). The KWA officials also maintain that though they had intimated in writing to the TRDCL six months ago that the road needed to be cut open at select points to expose the buried valve chambers, no response was forthcoming from the company. "Now we have told them that if they do not respond immediately, we will go ahead and cut open the road ourselves to gain access to the valve chambers. We had to do just that at Belhavens area," KWA PH division executive engineer G. Sudev said here on Thursday.

The valve chambers had to be opened as soon as possible to see whether the control valves from the main water lines at these points were `throttled' (in a semi-closed condition), said another KWA engineer. If so, the valves could be opened further. As a result, more water could be made available to the affected areas, the engineer said.

`No record of letter'

The TRDCL on the other hand maintains that they have no record of any such letter written to them by the KWA six months ago. TRDCL vice-president Anil Kumar Pandala told The Hindu on Thursday that the KWA did not intimate to his firm the locations of all valves and manholes on this stretch of the road.

The KWA had initially pointed out the locations of some manholes. These manholes were then raised flush with the resurfaced road. At that point, one TRDCL employee who had all the data on the manholes and valve chambers left the company.

The KWA was again requested to specify the locations of the manholes and valve chambers. Now, the KWA was talking about valve chambers it had never mentioned all this while, Mr. Pandala said.

"I came to know of this problem on Thursday evening. We will look into this issue tomorrow itself," Mr. Pandala said, adding that if all agencies concerned followed the well laid-out procedures for reporting such problems, there would be no confusion. Mr. Pandala also denied that the employees of the TRDCL had threatened KWA workers who dug up the road in front of Belhavens area.

Mr. Sudev confirmed that the TRDCL had agreed to work on the valve chamber problems on Friday.

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