Clean water for the Big Apple: How KSB ensured water supply in New York

The project: Supplying New York with drinking water

New York, a city with millions of inhabitants, needs huge amounts of clean drinking water around the clock. More than half of this water is transported to the city via the Rondout-West Branch Tunnel of the Delaware Aqueduct.

This 71-kilometre tunnel has a natural gradient which allows around 37 cubic metres of fresh water to be conveyed to the city every second.

The challenge: Securing water supply in New York

To secure New York’s drinking water supply for the coming years, the tunnel had to be rehabilitated. This, of course, needed to be done as quickly as possible to minimise the time during which the tunnel’s downtime had to be compensated for by other inflow channels.

Pumping the tunnel empty as quickly as possible demanded extremely powerful pumps, and these also had to be very reliable to minimise the risk of failure. 

The solution: Submersible pumps for the Delaware Aqueduct Tunnel

KSB installed five of the most powerful single-entry submersible borehole pump sets ever produced by KSB. The output of each pump is around 2,000 cubic metres an hour at a maximum rated head of 320 metres. The drives employed are 4-pole electric motors with a supply voltage of 4,160 volts.

Data I Facts I Figures

KSB products used

5 x BSFi 586/5 + EMD NQ 200-416 with special plugged cable connections, suction shroud, and an inducer to meet lowest NPSH requirements