By Marine Madatyan, Narek Aleksanyan

A section of the Haghtanak neighborhood in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, has gone without a sewer system for the past twenty years.

Local resident Vardan shows us around and jokes that we might come across a giant anaconda in one of the pools of tepid waste water.

Politicians only talk about the non-existent sewer system when elections roll around. They have made promises never kept.

Sewer pipes only reach the first street in the neighborhood.

Astghik Eliazyan said she didn’t know the area lacked a sewer system when she moved in nine years ago. Those that did know and purchased or built a house, just assumed that the problem would be taken care of by the municipal authorities.

Some home owners just build a large hole for the waste material, hiring workers to clean it out when necessary. There like primitive septic tanks without the filtration. Home owners say they spend around $100 every time for cleaning.

The other, more civilized solution, is to dig down deep into the substrata and then install a pipe to carry the wastes away. This entails digging a minimum of 20 meters at a cost of 15,000 AMD per meter ($32). This is no long-term solution either. According to resident Arman Manoukyan, the pipes sometimes get clogged and can no longer be used.

There are families in the neighborhood that have spent thousands on drilling wells and laying pipe, with mixed results.

Children are taught at an early age to steer clear of above-ground waste water. Parents are concerned that waste water flowing through the streets can serve as an incubator for a variety of diseases.

Home owners living on the side streets now connected to the main sewer pipes say they are willing to cover the cost of getting hooked up to the system.

Mr. Manoukyan says that residents and Yerevan Municipality officials jointly discussed the problem two years ago and estimated that it would take 40 million AMD to get the homes hooked up to the system. It was agreed that the homeowners would pay out 200-300,000 apiece to get the work done. Manoukyan says that the plane was later scrapped by the municipality.

Resident Vardan Khalatyan told Hetq that officials from the district council then showed up and walked around the neighborhood. “Out of the blue, they estimated that the work would cost double; 80 million AMD. They hiked the figure just so they could get their cut.”

Hetq wrote to the Yerevan Municipality asking if an official cost assessment of the job had been drafted and if any expenditures had been included in the budget. We also asked if the municipality had considered the proposal of residents – to extend the sewer pipe to the main street, after which they would pay for hook-ups.

Yerevan Water’s contract to operate and service the water distribution and removal systems for Yerevan ends in December 2016. This company has operated and serviced the water systems for the past eleven years. While the company and the Yerevan Municipality periodically sing the praises of their cooperation in the sector, it turns out that there are some neighborhoods who haven’t seen much tangible from that cooperation. They remain without sewer service.

At first, the Communal Services Division (CSD) at the Yerevan Municipality, in response to a Hetq inquiry, merely said that the list of those neighborhoods without sewer service was long, and that because of its scope, they couldn’t provide it. But we persisted and they were forced to reply and do the work they should have been doing from the start. Not to have such data is a gross oversight on their part.

The reason for the delay, according to the CSD, was that they didn’t have the necessary data in order to reply. Their delay violated the obligation for a public service to provide information within one month of receiving a valid inquiry.

 It was due to Hetq’s investigation and persistence that the municipality confessed that entire neighborhoods and streets have gone with water drainage and sewer systems for years. After months of “cooperation”, Hetq was able to draft a map of the eleven administrative districts of Yerevan and approximately specify those streets not yet serviced by local sewer systems.

The information provided by the CDS shows that 18 Yerevan neighborhoods and 14 streets have no sewer service at all, and that partial service exists for 11 streets.

The work done by the CDS is so amateurish that we cannot provide specific coordinates as to where service doesn’t exist.

For example, the CDS, in its reply, states that sewer service doesn’t exist “In the section above building 43 on Gai Avenue”, or “Opposite the bakery on Minsk Street.”

Given this situation, one wonders how the municipality goes about allocating the millions it receives in loans and credits to modernize the city’s water removal and sewer systems.

The Yerevan Water website says that Yerevan’s waste water removal system is made up of 220 kilometers of non-urban pipes and 950 kilometers of urban pipes. This data says nothing regarding what the company has done over the past eleven years.

Annually, the National Statistical Service (NSS), issues a report on the state of Yerevan’s utility infrastructure. According to the NSS, the urban sewer system has seen the construction of a mere 45 kilometers of pipe in the last eleven years.

The CSD told Hetq that the overall problem can only be discussed when a new company wins the contract now held by Yerevan Water.

Millions in Credits Invested in Improving Yerevan’s Water Distribution and Sewer System Since 2005

April 15, 2005: US$ 22 Million World Bank project. Completed 2011

2014: 27.3 Million Project (French government issues 24.9 million loan at favorable rates and Armenian government kicks in 2.4 million Euros)

P.S. Hetq has only listed those credit projects designed for Yerevan proper – improving both the water distribution and removal systems.