Georgian Town Hit by Sewage Floods

Dysentery and disease have become a summertime plague for a southern region in Georgia, where sewage spills into cellars and farmers rely on untreated water to irrigate their lands.



The outdated sewerage pipes in the Akhaltsikhe district, which is home to around 50,000 people, including 15,000 in the town of Akhaltsikhe itself, were built in the 1960s before the town gained any multi-storey apartment buildings.



They can no longer handle the volume of water flushed into them, and flooded streets and homes have become alarmingly frequent.



Tamara Kapanadze, a mother of two, who lives in Akhaltsikhe’s Tamarashvili Street, complained that her family has been all but starving since the sewerage system flooded the basement of her house.



“As we don’t have a refrigerator, it was in the basement that we stored all our food,” she said. “My husband works in Tbilisi, and we live off the money he sends us now and then. Now, however, we have been left with nothing to eat.”



Such stories are frequent in the town, and are part of a persistent problem in Georgia. Although the government has invested in infrastructure, the legacy of shoddy Soviet-built sewerage systems and a decade of post-independence neglect left many parts of Georgia suffering.



Lasha Chkadua, the president’s envoy in the Samtskhe-Djavakheti region, which includes Akhaltsikhe, said work had started on improving the sewerage pipes, but would not be finished by the end of the year.



“We started to restore the infrastructure this year, because there was no money before,” he told IWPR. “Last year for the restoration of the local infrastructure, such tiny sums were awarded to us in the budget, that there was no point even starting work.”



He said repairs had not been conducted for several decades, but promised that the problem would be resolved soon.



“First, we will replace the sewerage pipes, so the population will not be flooded with sewage. In subsequent years, we will definitely resolve issues around cleaning the neighbourhood.”



Kapanadze and her neighbours have come to dread heavy rain when the sewerage system is most prone to collapse.



“We go out to respond to such failures at least three times every day,” said Guram Sheshaberidze, director of Tskhalkanali, the company responsible for repairing the local sewerage system.



“The old pipes are very narrow and not up to handling the existing volumes of sewage water.”



The health problems were growing increasingly serious, according to local doctors and academics.



“Outbreaks of dysentery and enteroviruses have occurred frequently in the town,” said Manana Grdzelishvili of the Sanitation and Hygiene Research Institute.



She said there was a danger of other infectious diseases - such as cholera, typhoid, jaundice and others – affecting the area, if the sewage problem continued to remain unaddressed.



Through over a hundred sewers, waste water enters the river Potskhovi and its three tributaries running across the town.



The contaminated water is used for irrigating local crops and, in summer, housewives wash carpets in the river, while their children paddle in the water, putting themselves at risk of infection.



Jumber Lomidze, 70, lives in the village of Tsnisi. He grows potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and other vegetables on his plot of land, which he irrigates with water from the river.



“I know well what kind of water we have flowing in the river, but if I don’t irrigate my land, it won’t get any crops,” he said. “Whether I die of hunger or get killed by a disease caused by contaminated water, it’s the same difference, isn’t it?”



Ideally, sewage water should be discharged into a river only after it has been treated in special cleansing facilities, Grdzelishvili said.



“The use of this water for irrigation purposes creates a high risk of dangerous substances affecting human health,” she said.



“In hot weather, the water in the river evaporates, causing the levels of concentration of harmful substances in it to increase. The faeces-contaminated water causes virus, germ and parasitic diseases.”



Local residents blame the authorities for failing to address the situation.



“Every time a failure occurs, they come, do some mending, but days later things repeat themselves,” said Giorgi.



“They should build a proper sewerage system, how long are we going to live amidst the faeces?”



Sheshaberidze, of the pipe repair company, said there had been attempts to improve the situation.



“In 2007, we had Germans visiting here,” he said.



“They were to build water treatment facilities and replace the sewerage system with a new one. The project was estimated at 17 million US dollars. Even a working plan was drawn up, but, for some unknown reason, it has never been fulfilled.”



Tamar Uchidze is a correspondent with the newspaper Southern Gates in Akhaltsikhe.