Chennai: As the city heads to one of its worst droughts come summer, former engineering director of Chennai metro water S. Sundaramurthy on Tues­day urged the autho­rities to emulate California model of water management to keep acute water crisis at bay.

Orange County near California gets only 50 percentile of the rain Chennai city gets, but the people there get 250lpcd (liters per capita per day), whereas people here struggle to get 100lpcd, Sundaramurthy said during the announcement of the 8th edition of Water Today’s three-day “Water Expo” to be held at Chennai Trade Centre from January 20.

By arresting the flow of sewage in to ocean and in­jecting the same into the ground at a depth of 400 meters using injection wells, groundwater would get recharged and the same could be tapped through bore wells years later, the IIT-M educated engineer who headed the CMWSSB engineering de­p­artment in 1990s said.

Pointing out that in-built sewage treatment facilities in several multi-storied residential complexes on ECR were no good, Sundaramurthy said advising CMWSSB to pump sewage from the private townships using its tankers and treat the same on collection of a fee from the residences there.

S. Shanmugham, managing director Water Today Pvt Ltd and Naina Shah, editor, Water Today, said the water expo and its conferences would open new vistas to the public and private players in water and sewage management by bringing multi-national technology partners to the city.