The Tersefanou dam and the Archangelos flood control dam in Aradippou, costing tens of millions of euros, will contribute to improving the water balance and to the protection of citizens, the Minister of Agriculture, Rural Affairs said today of Development and Environment of Kostas Kadis.
Mr. Kadis, accompanied by Andreas Grigoriou, Director General of the Ministry of Andreas Grigoriou and Panagiota Hatzigeorgiou, Director of the Water Development Department, visited today the dam in Tersefanou and the anti-flood dam Archangelos in Aradippou.
In statements in Larnaca, Mr. Kadis said that “today we are visiting important infrastructure projects under construction in the province of Larnaca, which are part of the strategy of the Government and the Ministry of Agriculture to improve the water balance of the country. With climate change, the water resources that we accumulate in a natural way are limited, while the needs are increasing, and therefore we will have to find ways to satisfy these needs”.
He added that “tertiary water treatment is definitely an option that we are taking advantage of. The Larnaca Station is already operating and the dam in Tersefanou will essentially be used to store the water produced by the Station, so that it can then be distributed to the crops in the area” he said and noted that “in this way we will have significant water resources for the farmers of the wider area”.
He also mentioned that “the strategy of the Ministry of Agriculture is definitely to deal with floods with the Department of Water Development in charge. It is for this reason that two important infrastructure projects are being built in the area of Aradippou and they are the Archangelos and Kamitsi dams, the cost of which amounts to around nine million euros, and their construction has been a long-standing request of the region”.
He also noted that “these are projects worth tens of millions of euros and which I believe will also improve the water balance and contribute to the protection of citizens”.
The Minister expressed his thanks to his colleagues in the Department of Water Development as well as to the companies that undertook the projects, expressing the hope that they will be completed within their schedules. The project in Tersefanou is expected to be completed by next summer and its cost will reach around 12 million euros, while another equal amount corresponds to the pipelines that will distribute the water in the surrounding area, he said.
Asked about the fullness of the dams, the Minister replied that “based on the information we have from the Department of Water, it is around 66% and we hope that within the next period we will have rains so that the fullness will increase because as we know December was a month that took us back”.
