WADI AL ASLA
WADI AL ASLA
Once a dumping ground for the city’s waste, this wadi has undergone a significant transformation from hazardous eye-sore to recreational centre piece for the community, Alan Travers, technical director at Buro Happold, explains how the challenge was tackled
Te dry wadi lies about 15 km inland from Jeddah up in some low hills. Due to the lack of good infrastructure – in particular sanitary draining and sewage treatment capacity – one of the solutions for dealing with this waste, was to dump it in the wadi, which according to Travers, had been happening for between 15-20 years. Te years of dumping waste at the wadi created a number of issues. For the residents of Jeddah, it was a health hazard and was seen as dirty and polluted. “Secondly, as this lake was getting bigger and bigger, it was thought
T
the dam could fail and all of this dirty water could flood down the wadi and end up in Jeddah, this was seen to be quite an undesirable place,” Travers explains. Trough previous work the engineering consultancy Buro Happold had done with the municipality, Travers says it was clear the wadi was a key issue that needed to be faced. Buro Happold was commissioned by the Jeddah Development and Urban Regeneration Company (JDURC), the development arm of the Municipality of Jeddah, to devise an Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for the Wadi Al Asla site.
he project at Wadi Al Asla had been an issue for the municipality in Jeddah for many years and locals often referred to the area as the ‘Musk Lake,’ a diplomatic term for the sewage lake it had become.
“We put some proposals to the municipality about how we might address this problem. Tat initiative wasn’t actually put into practice until 18 months ago. Te municipality, through the JDURC was given the responsibility for developing a concept master plan for the wadi and wider area. It was part of the plan to find a solution to this sewage lake.” The JDURC commissioned Buro Happold – who worked with Canadian
architects Moriyama & Teshima – to undertake the concept master- plan for the wadi. The company has had office in Saudi Arabia for over 20 years and Travers says Saudi Arabia was seen as a place where Buro Happold had much to offer and could ‘develop extremely strong relationships with clients.’ “Te key issue for us to address at Wadi Al Asla, was to rectify the sewage
lake. At that time the lake was about 3.5 sq km in area and we estimated it contained 10 million cubic metres of waste water. At one point they were dumping about 70,000 cubic metres of waste water every day. By the time we became involved, that had reduced to 30,000 cubic metres per day. Our solution to dealing with that was looking to the small sewage treatment plant close by. Tis smaller plant was able to take some water through the lake, treat it and the treated sewage effluent was being used to irrigate some large areas of forest in the area in order to use the water for a useful
22 I CITYSCAPE I JUNE 2011
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