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 Selvinaz Korucuoğlu · 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.

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.