• managed to complete 10.9 km of pipelaying in the month of June and 11.8km in July

STAFF WRITER

Estate Construction, one of the blue-chip citizen-owned construction companies, has invested more resources to complete the state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant in Kanye.

In an interview recently, the Estate Construction Project Manager Julius R Katzke revealed that they had committed more resources to the project after being saddled by the Covid-19 pandemic and heavy rainfalls last year.

"We have committed both human and plant resources to the project and we are elated because we are now reaping the effects of that as production has gone up significantly," he said.

Katzke said they have managed to do 10.9 kilometers of pipelaying in one month and 256 man holes, which have been a challenge.  

The pipeline's total length to be laid is about 412 Km, and 180 kilometers has so far been laid, leaving a balance of 232 kilometers.

 "If we continue to work at this pace and increasing both human and capital resources  I am optimistic, we will be able to complete the project on time," revealed a confident Katzke.

He said that the project is currently at around 70% and that they are now employing more resources on man holes.

The contract for constructing the Kanye Sanitation Scheme commenced in October 2015 and was initially planned to be completed in March 2019 but still funds were not availed at the beginning of the contract until 2016.

The project has since been extended to March 2023 due to the prevalence of hard rocks in Kanye.

Briefing Parliament last year, Minister of Land Management, Water and Sanitation Services, Kefentse 

Mzwinila said that a geotechnical assessment conducted by Africon Consultants at the pre-construction stage anticipated 8% of the total excavation to be in hard rock against the 30% of the sewage works that were actually completed by September 2019.

Once the project is complete, Kanye will have a fully automated biological wastewater treatment plant that meets the best available techniques (BAT) quality standards at all its production sites.

Early this year, the company employed more engineers primarily through its Graduate Training Program, which aims to give graduates onsite experience for a minimum of three years.

One of the program's beneficiaries, Omphemetse Sibangane, who holds a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, said that he has so far learnt a lot from the Kanye Sewage Scheme project.

"I am under the mentorship of Engineering Site Agents. My day to day duties entail assisting in developing budgets, doing plant listing and producing reports that are handed to the project manager," he said.

Rachel Sehunelo, a graduate from Boitekanelo College who is a health and safety officer, cherished the Graduate Training Programe as an opportunity for her to amass many skills from a construction site.

"My day to day job is to inspect manholes that are a risk to the public especially in built up areas, make assessments and compile a report for the project manager. Doing construction work in a rocky and built up area like Kanye poses lot of challenges and we are committed to ensuring the safety of the community that we serve as well as the environment that they live in," revealed Sehunelo.

Earlier this year, Estate Construction inducted the 12 graduate civil engineers and 18 graduate occupational health and Safety Officers, as a way of welcoming them into its fold and hence attaching them to the different sites. They went further to hire four registered training institutions to train the Graduates on the art of Team Building in the work environment.