Activities of illegal miners, locally known as ‘galamsey,’ in the Oda River is becoming dangerous as they keep operating despite the threat posed by their work to the Odaso Water Treatment Plant.
The pollution has reached a stage where more than half of treated water is going waste, officials of the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) have revealed.
“The designed capacity of the Odaso plant is 4 million gallons per day. In respect of the current situation we have at Odaso, based on the pollution of the river source, we are now producing only 40 percent of the designed capacity, throwing 60 percent of the water we extract for treatment which means that the plant is seriously under threat”, Ashanti Regional Chief Manager in-charge of Production for GWCL, Dr Hanson Mensah-Akutteh said.
The Odaso water treatment plant supplies treated water to the residents of Obuasi and its environs. The miners are currently conducting their illegality directly in the Oda River, few meters away from the water treatment plant.
The inability of the treatment plant to produce up to capacity has led to water rationing in communities that source pipe-borne water from the Odaso Treatment Plant.
Some affected residents now rely on groundwater or sometimes nearby streams to access water for domestic activities. The plant, according to officials, risk being shut down if the pollution continues.
“Before the advent of ‘galamsey’, the process loss was about 5 percent, but now it’s 60 percent. There will be a time whe’n the plant itself by the nature of the system design may not be able to treat water anymore. In that case, we will have to shut down and nobody will get water”, Dr Mensah-Akutteh warned.
Like the Oda River, many water bodies in the country continue to suffer pollution.
Attaining the Sustainable Development Goal 6 target of ‘Access to clean water for all by 2030’ may be missed by Ghana if the pollution of water bodies is left unchecked.
