Water · Ikorodu, Lagos
Ikorodu gets its water back: inside the ₦4.8bn works upgrade
New clarifiers, a 12 megalitre reservoir and nine kilometres of trunk mains now serve about 180,000 people. Our engineers explain how it was built without cutting supply for a single day.
Treatment tanks at the upgraded works. Example photo.
The old works at Ikorodu had served the town since the 1980s, and it showed. Two of four clarifiers were out of service, the reservoir leaked, and households in the newer estates went days without pressure. When the water corporation (an example client) asked us to design the upgrade, it set one condition: the taps could not go dry during the works.
We split the project into five stages, each with its own temporary bypass. New clarifiers were built beside the old ones and brought online before anything was demolished. The reservoir was lined in two halves, one in service while the other cured.
On the network, nine kilometres of new ductile iron mains were laid mostly at night, when traffic on the Ikorodu road thins. Each section was pressure tested before connection, and our resident engineer signed off every joint record.
The result is a works that produces 40 per cent more water using less power, thanks to new pumps sized for actual demand rather than a 1980s forecast. Continued on page C2.
