Customer: Sime Darby
Project Date: 2009-2010
Malaysia receives between 2.5 and 3 metres of rain a year. By comparison, a country like Denmark sees a mere 745 mm a year on average. In spite of this, Malaysia experiences water shortages if it rains just a little less than normal for a few months.
Therefore, Sime Darby handed NIRAS an exciting project when they gave us the job of finding groundwater in Malaysia, thus remedying the threatening water shortage. Several NIRAS employees have been seconded to Malaysia during the course of the project and it has proved no small task.
In general, it is not easy to obtain data in Malaysia. Therefore, the team, which consisted of engineers, geologists, geophysicists and GIS experts, had to take their own measurements of rivers, river sectional profiles and the rate of water flow in rivers. 39 exploratory drillings were made at depths of between 30 and 150 metres, 55 drill hole logs were made of new and existing drillings and multi-electrode profiling (MEP) was performed over an area of more than 35 km. NIRAS collected all of this data in two large regional groundwater models in Mike She.
One of the project’s major challenges was that the capacity of the Malaysian drilling contractors is not very large, neither in terms of quality nor in terms of quantity. As a result, we had to draw up detailed guidelines for drilling, test pumping, water sampling, etc.
This project has helped NIRAS strengthen its position as a market leader in the field of groundwater surveys.