When Empresas Públicas de Medellín was born, in 1955, the city had 500 thousand inhabitants. By then, the aqueduct service in the 10 towns of the Aburrá Valley was provided by municipal entities.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the company tackled the designs of a large drinking water distribution network. Thus, an aqueduct treatment and coverage system was built that integrated the La Fe reservoir, in the municipality of El Retiro, Eastern Antioquia, with the La Ayurá plant, in Envigado.
For almost 60 years, this infrastructure has supplied liquid to the inhabitants of the municipalities of La Estrella, Sabaneta, Itagüí and Envigado, as well as a vast sector of Medellín through the Nutibara, Campestre, Las Brujas, Los Parra, Belencito circuits. and Ayura.
With an investment of $113,000 million, since 2019 EPM has been advancing the modernization of the La Ayurá water treatment plant and the La Fe reservoir, seeking to guarantee the sustainability of water in the San Nicolás and Aburrá Valleys.
“It is a water security strategy for the territory that will ensure supply for the next 50 years in the metropolitan area and Rionegro, which is already interconnected with this aqueduct system,” highlighted Santiago Ochoa Posada, vice president of Water and Sanitation at EPM. .
With these works, La Ayurá will expand its coverage capacity to 500,000 more inhabitants and will generate greater purification flows. This increase will make it possible to exchange water volumes with the Manantiales plant, located between Bello and Copacabana.
“Thus, we will have a dual system from south to north, or vice versa, which will allow us to move the distribution of water, according to the supply of each of the reservoirs and the territories. This will give us greater reliability in the supply of liquid,” said the manager.
Water supply and power generation
The La Ayurá purification plant is a complex that involves water and hydroelectric phases. Using gravity, the flow leaves the La Fe reservoir through an underground tunnel and then descends through three tubes of 24, 32 and 36 inches in diameter to the well of a micro hydroelectric plant. There, a turbine generates 18 megawatts of energy.
“Three megawatts are used to operate the plant; The company delivers the remaining 15 MW to the country’s interconnected system for sale,” said Santiago Barrera Montoya, chief engineer of the La Ayurá water treatment plant.
After generating energy, the water enters the storage structure where it receives the different processes: filtration, disinfection, coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, alkalinization, pre-oxidation, purification and distribution.
“With chlorine we eliminate any microbial load that is present in the water and at the end it is alkalized, which is a management of the acidity so as not to corrode the pipes. With laboratory tests, right here at the plant, we permanently monitor the water we supply 24 hours a day,” explained the engineer.