Council · Infrastructure

Sixty-year-old water mains to be replaced street by street

The council has signed a three-year contract to replace the town's oldest water mains, after a summer in which three neighbourhoods lost pressure for days at a time and nearly a third of treated water never reached a tap.

By Nilgün Taşpınarlı · 4 August 2026

Work begins in September on the first of forty-one streets scheduled to have their cast-iron water mains dug out and replaced, under a contract the council signed last Thursday with a consortium led by a regional infrastructure firm. The programme is priced at 96 million lira and is planned to run for three years, street by street, with the oldest and most fault-prone sections first.

The pipes in question were laid between 1961 and 1974. The municipal water directorate recorded 214 main breaks on them in the past twelve months, more than double the figure from five years ago. In July, when demand peaked, pressure failures left parts of three neighbourhoods — Çınarlı, Bağlarbaşı and the streets around the old market — without reliable supply for as long as four days.

"The network is telling us, very loudly, that it has reached the end of its life," said Havva Sözeri, the deputy mayor responsible for infrastructure. "We have been patching the same pipes for twenty years. Every repair buys months now, not years. At some point patching becomes the expensive option, and we passed that point some time ago."

The directorate's own figures support her. Non-revenue water — treated water that leaves the plant but never reaches a customer, lost mostly to leaks — stood at 31 per cent last year. The national average for towns of comparable size is around 24 per cent. Every percentage point, the directorate estimates, costs the town roughly 1.1 million lira a year in pumping and treatment.

"Every repair buys months now, not years. Patching became the expensive option some time ago."

The replacement uses high-density polyethylene pipe, welded into continuous runs, which the contractor says should cut joint failures to near zero. Where street geometry allows, the crews will use directional drilling rather than open trenches, threading the new pipe beneath the road surface with only two pits per street.

Berkant Yalınçam, the consortium's site engineer, said the sequencing was designed around the school calendar and the weekly market. "No street stays open longer than three weeks, that is the promise we have made and the penalty clause we have accepted," he said. "The first two streets are our proving ground. If we cannot hold three weeks there, the council has the right to re-tender the rest."

Not everyone on the affected streets is reassured. İlkay Bostancıgil, who has run the pharmacy on Çınarlı's main street for nineteen years, remembers the last major roadworks. "In 2019 they resurfaced this street and it took eleven weeks instead of four," she said. "My delivery van could not reach the door for two months. I want the new pipes, everyone wants the new pipes — but I have heard the word 'penalty clause' before."

The contract published on the council's site does include liquidated damages: 40,000 lira per street per day beyond the three-week window, capped at 8 per cent of the contract value. It also holds back 5 per cent of each street's payment until the road surface has survived one winter without subsidence.

There is a hydrogeological argument for urgency as well. Melisa Dorukhanlı, who teaches water resource engineering at the regional university and sat on the council's technical review panel, points out that the town's supply already runs close to its licensed abstraction limit in dry years. "A network losing thirty-one per cent is, in effect, pumping a third town that does not exist," she said. "Fixing the pipes is the cheapest new reservoir Kavaklıdere will ever build."

The first two streets — Mektep Street and the upper section of İskele Street — begin in the second week of September. The council has published the full three-year sequence, and says households will be notified by letter and SMS three weeks before work reaches their street. Water cuts during changeover are promised to stay under six hours per household.

The directorate will publish monthly progress figures, including breaks, non-revenue water and completed streets, on its website from October. The first annual review is scheduled for next September, when the council's audit committee will compare the programme's first-year cost against the tendered price.