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Greg Bentley, the charismatic CEO of US headquarted, global software supplier Bentley Systems Inc., had made “Sustainable infrastructure through interoperable software” as the operating principle.

Two of their products, WaterGEMS and HAMMER, used in ManilaWater’s Antipolo water supply system had evidently resulted in a more sustainable water networking for the community.

ANTIPOLO CITY is located in the northern half of Rizal Province which is within the eastern boundary of metropolitan Manila. Antipolo City is the second largest in Rizal Province, with a total land area of 38,575 hectares. The topography of the service area is rugged, rising from the coastal plain at elevations of about 6 to 12 m above sea level in the Mayamot area up to 300m on the eastern border of the service area.

The Antipolo network system is comprised of three stages of pumping stations located at Kingsville, Siruna and Lucban, and 2 reservoirs at Siruna and Lucban. From the Balara treatment plant, water is being supplied to Antipolo by gravity through the 1200 mm Tanong Line, which serves as the suction line to Kingsville pumping station. Water is then pumped from the Kingsville pumping station to the Siruna pumping station and then into the reservoir via the 1200 mm primary line, and finally it is pumped to Lucban Reservoir via the 1000 mm primary line.

In order to optimise the Antipolo Water Supply System, ManilaWater’s plan was to:

• Cater for the anticipated rapid growth of the area from a current population of 656,000 people to 2.2 million by 2022,

• Evaluate the steady state and transient hydraulics of the preferred pipeline, pump station and reservoir combination,

• Improve the reliability and efficiency of the Antipolo network system.

Challenges
This project was not going to be easy, since the Antipolo water supply system presented many challenges.

The 1200 mm suction line had limited capacity.It served as a constraint in maximizing the output of the first pumping station in Kingsville).

The hilly terrain of the Antipolo area presented one of the major difficulties in designing the water distribution system for the area. Its topography has extreme range of elevations with areas having elevations as high as 300 m to a low point of around 20 m above sea level. Efforts to overcome this challenge were previously made by maintaining high pressure heads at the pumping stations, but the extreme differences in elevation created intensively high pressure heads in the lowlying areas (areas near the source or downstream of Antipolo) and these high pressures resulted in pipe breakages. Incidents of power failure were very frequent in the area, thus creating sudden shifts in pumping operations, which again resulted in several incidents of pipe breakages and water supply interruptions.