Two for One in Shanghai
19 January 2006 14:36
Residents in the three downtown districts of Xuhui, Luwan and Jing’an in Shanghai no longer need to worry about flooding in the rainy season. The reason: the installation of a new pump station, the Zhaojiabang Pump Station, which is currently the largest combined rainwater/sewage pump station in the city.
Situated on an estuary of the Yangtze River, Shanghai enjoys an annual rainfall of around 1,100 millimetres, usually with a rainy season lasting from mid-June to the first 10 days of July. From July to September, the city is also often hit by typhoons coming from the Pacific Ocean, bringing with them heavy rains. So every year in the rainy season the city is on full alert, ready to mobilize in the event of a typhoon or heavy rainstorm.
Drainage is especially important to Xuhui, Luwan and Jing’an, three of Shanghai’s downtown districts, because the districts are home to many high-end residential complexes, municipal administrative buildings, foreign general consulates, bustling shopping centres and Grade-A office buildings.
“It is a nuisance to have to wade through knee-deep sewage in the streets after a heavy storm,” says one local inhabitant of Xuhui District. And many drivers, white-collar workers, public servants and foreign visitors have found themselves with drenched shoes, trousers, furniture and even bedding, if they happened to live on the ground floor.
One American businessman whose office is on Huaihai Road (one of the most famous shopping streets in the city) recalls taxis driving “as fast as they could through the muddy water on the streets, without caring about splashing dirt on pedestrians on the pavement.”.
Zhaojiabang, which means Zhaojia River in Chinese, used to be a river. On its south side lay mostly farmland; on the north side was an industrialized zone created in the first half of the 20th century. Over the years, as rain, sewage and garbage were discharged into the river, it developed an extremely bad smell.
To improve the situation, in the mid-20th century the municipal government invested huge amounts to fill the river and build a road under which drainage pipes were buried. The Zhaojiabang Pump Station was built near Zhaojiabang Road and Ruijin Nanlu in 1956.
At the time it was built the Zhaojiabang Pump Station was the largest of its kind in the city. However, with the sharp growth in population and construction activities resulting from the rapid development of the city, the drainage system became increasingly inadequate.
According to a report from the Shanghai Urban Construction Design & Research Institute, which designed the project, the old Zhaojiabang drainage facilities failed to meet the environmental and social requirements of the region.
Meanwhile, the downtown flooding damaged the city’s image as a metropolitan and commercial centre. It was crucial to renovate the drainage system in order to keep pace with the changing era, said the report.
In 2000, the municipal government decided to replace the old Zhaojiabang Pump Station with a new one near the crossing of Zhaofeng Road and Zhongshan Nanlu on the west side of the newly completed landmark Lupu Bridge over the Huangpu River. The pump station project, with a total investment of 336 million yuan (USD 40.6 million), won strong support from the districts involved, as well as from the government.
The new site, covering an area of 6,000 square metres, is about two kilo-metres from the old site. “With a service area of 7.4 square kilometres, the new station can now handle the rain, which has recently been the heaviest it’s been in a century, according to Shanghai’s records, without leaving long-term seepage on the streets or flooding in the households,” says Yu Zhan, deputy chief engineer of the Shanghai Environment Protection Complete Engineering Co Ltd, the contracted builder for the project.
Compared with the old, soon-to-be-abandoned Zhaojiabang Pump Station, which had a total flow of 15 cubic metres per second, the new station has nine rainwater pumps with a total flow capacity of 28.7 cubic metres per second and four sewage pumps with a total flow of 4.54 cubic metres per second.
The tender process for the Zhaojiabang Pump Station project began at the end of 2001, and attracted eight bidders, with Yu’s company the winner. “Three international pump suppliers fought to be part of the contract, and ITT was finally chosen,” Yu says. “Even though its prices were never the lowest, the products are really reliable.”
The new Zhaojiabang Pump Station successfully passed debugging in June 2004 and completed a satisfactory trial operation last summer. It has now passed the primary quality examination by the end user and is to be put into full operation in 2005, guaranteeing that all the local residents will have a clean summer. If it is successful, as expected by the parties involved in the project, the final hand-over will take place in a year, according to Chinese regulations.
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