The government said on Tuesday it is taking all necessary steps to ensure the Paphos district has adequate water supply, after a desalination plant was taken offline.

Andreas Gregoriou, a senior official with the agriculture ministry, said authorities are in touch with the operators of the desalination plant – destroyed by a fire earlier this month – to get the facility back up and running as swiftly as possible.

At the same time, the government is taking other actions to make sure the Paphos district does not face a water shortage.

The water development department will speed up the call for tenders for the construction of a mobile desalination plant in Paphos. This is part of a broader drive for building four mobile plants across the island during 2025.

Gregoriou also said plans are afoot for the construction of two new, full-scale desalination facilities.

“We are making efforts to ensure no problem arises regarding water supply, and we believe there will be no such problem,” said the official.

Authorities would meanwhile make use of the water resources available at the two local reservoirs.

Gregoriou was asked to comment on the dire warnings made earlier by Paphos district governor Charalambos Pittokopitis.

Pittokopitis had spoken of the option of building two new dams in the Paphos area. However, Gregoriou suggested that Pittokopitis was uninformed. He said that studies had been carried out a decade ago that determined that construction of the two extra dams was not a viable option.

Gregoriou went on to note that Cyprus currently has 110 water dams with a total capacity of approximately 330 million tonnes in its reservoirs.

“With the existing desalination plants, we get around 230,000 to 250,000 tonnes of water daily,” said Gregoriou.

“This creates a cost of about €10 million a month. We are the country consuming the most desalinated water.”

Earlier, Pittokopitis had said the destroyed desalination plant had a total capacity of 15,000 cubic metres of water per day and served the needs of around a third of the town of Paphos as well as a “large part” of the wider district.

He said plans for a second desalination unit must be accelerated so that it comes online by the summer of 2025, otherwise “the situation will be tragic”.