Wadi Al Asla in Jeddah was once a dumping ground for the city’s waste but has undergone a significant transformation from hazardous eye-sore to recreational centre piece for the community.
Alan Travers, technical director at Buro Happold, explains how the challenge was tackled.
The project at Wadi Al Asla had been an issue for the municipality in Jeddah for many years and locals often referred to the area as the ‘Musk Lake,’ a diplomatic term for the sewage lake it had become. The dry wadi lies about 15 km inland from Jeddah up in some low hills. Due to the lack of good infrastructure – in particular sanitary draining and sewage treatment capacity – one of the solutions for dealing with this waste, was to dump it in the wadi, which according to Travers, had been happening for between 15-20 years.
The years of dumping waste at the wadi created a number of issues. For the residents of Jeddah, it was a health hazard and was seen as dirty and polluted.
“Secondly, as this lake was getting bigger and bigger, it was thought the dam could fail and all of this dirty water could flood down the wadi and end up in Jeddah, this was seen to be quite an undesirable place,” Travers explains.
Through previous work Buro Happold had done with the municipality, four to five years previously, Travers says it was clear the wadi was a key issue that needed to be faced. Buro Happold was commissioned by the Jeddah Development and Urban Regeneration Company (JDURC), the development arm of the Municipality of Jeddah, to devise an Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for the Wadi Al Asla site.
“We put some proposals to the municipality about how we might address this problem. That initiative wasn’t actually put into practice until 18 months ago. The municipality, through the JDURC was given the responsibility for developing a concept master plan for the wadi and wider area. It was part of the plan to find a solution to this sewage lake.”
The JDURC commissioned Buro Happold – who worked with Canadian architects Moriyama & Teshima – to undertake the concept master-plan for the wadi. The company has had office in Saudi Arabia for over 20 years and Travers says Saudi Arabia was seen as a place where Buro Happold had much to offer and could ‘develop extremely strong relationships with clients.’
“The key issue for us to address at Wadi Al Asla, was to rectify the sewage lake. At that time the lake was about 3.5 sq km in area and we estimated it contained 10 million cubic metres of waste water. At one point they were dumping about 70,000 cubic metres of waste water every day. By the time we became involved, that had reduced to 30,000 cubic metres per day. Our solution to dealing with that was looking to the small sewage treatment plant close by. This smaller plant was able to take some water through the lake, treat it and the treated sewage effluent was being used to irrigate some large areas of forest in the area in order to use the water for a useful purpose,” Travers explains.
Despite the fact the sewage treatment plant could process 30,000 cubic metres per day, the same quantity was still being dumped, so drying the lake up, looked impossible.
Although it was a step in the right direction, Travers says much more needed to be done. “The sewage treatment capacity was doubled to 60,000 cubic metres per day and the dumping was progressively reduced to the point where it was stopped about a year ago. Therefore, the lake dried in nine months. The waste water also had a solid component and we had to harvest that organic material and go through a composting process so it could be used as fertiliser. We had to capture the benefit and saw it as another opportunity.” Beyond the concept master plan, other consultants and contractors were tasked with taking the project forwards.
Floods of 2009
Buro Happold was just getting to the completion stage of the master plan draft when the major floods of November 2009 occurred. Travers says: “One of the things we had to do was look at the risk of flooding at the wadi site and the risk that might have on making its way to Jeddah. There’s a large emergency dam, it was constructed because of the fear the sewage lake might burst its banks and that water might flow into the city.
“During the floods of Nov 2009, the amount of rainfall we had, completely filled up all available space within the sewage lake and completely filled the reservoir space behind the emergency lake aswell. It just got to the point of over topping, if those two lakes had not been in place, the floods would have been many times worse.
“It enabled us to test our concept master plan design, we were able to check and amend our storm water drainage in the plan and cater for an extreme event like we saw in November 2009.” Travers says that storm water management is a key component along with the infrastructure for sewage drainage, which ‘has been seriously lacking over the years.’
He adds that there is a directive that sewage effluent should not be discharged into the red sea. “That’s a fine aspiration for protecting the environment and is absolutely laudable. The difficulty arises, when you’ve got millions of people there consuming water, and even if it’s treated to high standard the city will end up with 1-1.5 million cubic metres of sewage effluent by 2015, where does that go?”
Travers says, through Buro Happold’s work, the municipality, and relationship with JDRUC, the idea arose that they could capture sewage effluent, bring it back to the wadi and use it to drive the quality of public areas. They could create gardens, a better environment via water based landscape and create quality space for development. The project was very similar to work carried out in Riyadh on Wadi Hanifah.
“Although we weren’t dealing with a huge sewage lake in Riyadh, we were still dealing with very poor water quality being pumped out of the city into the Wadi Hanifah. It was poorly treated waste water, the challenge was to improve water quality into city drainage so it became safe and healthy for the people of Riyadh. The way people are now using that space is phenomenal.”
Summarising the success of the project due to the company’s unique and cutting-edge approach, Travers concludes: “The key challenge for Buro Happold was to take an undesirable place, and change people’s perspective of the area from very negative to overwhelmingly positive.”
Travers says his company’s approach could be replicated throughout the world, especially in the arid zones and countries where there are waste water issues. “Instead of seeing it as a problem, people have got to change their mindset and see it as we have. We approached it as an opportunity.”