The first mobile desalination unit at the Moni power station in the Limassol district was put into operation on Tuesday, acting water development department director George Kazantzis said.

The unit is one of 13 of its kind to have been imported from the United Arab Emirates and placed in Moni, with Kazantzis saying he expects the others to be “gradually” put into operation in due course.

“All our crews are on site and have been continuing tests since yesterday, together with technicians from the company which built the units, and we believe that by this afternoon, the first unit will start operating,” he told the Cyprus News Agency.

He added that if the operation of the first unit goes smoothly, as many as three may be put into operation before the end of Tuesday.

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He then described the installation of the mobile desalination units as an “extremely complex process which took place in limited time”.

Of the water itself, he said that whatever is not required by consumers in the Limassol district will be transferred to the southern conveyor and channelled to the Nicosia, Larnaca, and Famagusta districts, which are all currently receiving water from the Kouris reservoir, northwest of Limassol.

As such, he said, he hopes to reduce the supply of water from the reservoir to the Nicosia, Larnaca, and Famagusta districts “so that more water can remain in Limassol”.

It had initially been hoped that the units would be operational by June, but Kazantzis had said last month that delays had arisen due to the “complicated” nature of the project.

The arrival of the desalination units from the UAE was announced by President Nikos Christodoulides in April, with government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis later saying there will be “no risk” of there being any water cuts in Cyprus this summer as a result of the units’ forthcoming arrival.

Christodoulides had stressed that the units will be provided “free of charge”, a fact he said “underlines the importance of relations in the context of the country’s foreign policy, and in matters of internal policy”.

However, not everyone has been impressed by the government’s direction of travel with regard to the issue of water.

Coastal engineer Xenia Loizidou earlier slammed the government’s plan to import mobile desalination plants as an “incoherent panic solution”.

She said the units are “of course a solution”, but that “to really solve the water problem, the first thing which needs to be done is to invest in infrastructure and proper management of uses”.

This, she said, must entail there being “no lawns and golf courses” and an “adaptation” of crops to plant those which are less water intensive.

“If with two accidents, Mavrokolympos and Kouklia, the entire state planning collapses, then we are clearly a country which is defenceless and this water policy has failed over time,” she said, referring to the draining of the Mavrokolympos reservoir and a fire at a desalination plant in the village of Kouklia.

There had then been controversy over the units’ location, with the government having initially decided to only place mobile desalination units in the Limassol district, leaving officials from the neighbouring Paphos district upset and perplexed.

However, the government did later agree to place a mobile desalination unit in the Paphos district, choosing to install it near Kouklia.