Direct Water Pumping Restored in Hurghada's Star City; Desalination Wells Planned for Red Sea Villages

Water services on the Red Sea coast moved on two fronts this week, with the utility confirming restored supply in one Hurghada district and a separate newspaper report pointing to new desalination capacity for villages outside the main towns.

Direct pumping back in Star City

The Red Sea Water Company announced that direct pumping has returned to normal in the Star City area of Hurghada, according to Dar Al-Maaref, which carried the company's statement on 20 August. The announcement does not say how long the interruption lasted, what caused it, or which streets inside the district were affected.

Direct pumping is what keeps water arriving at mains pressure. When it drops, buildings fall back on rooftop and ground tanks and, if those run down, on tanker deliveries — a familiar summer strain for residents and for the smaller hotels and guesthouses away from the main resort strip, where demand climbs with the heat.

Desalination wells for the villages

Al-Masry Al-Youm reported separately that desalination wells are being carried out to serve villages in the Red Sea governorate. That report does not name the villages, or give a cost, a contractor, a capacity or a completion date.

The coast has almost no fresh groundwater of its own and leans on desalination plants and the long pipeline from the Nile Valley, which is why village-level desalination is treated here as a question of supply rather than of comfort. Hurghada News reported earlier this month that the Red Sea governor put the governorate's water deficit at 100,000 cubic metres a day.

For residents, the practical read is one district back on normal supply and a stated intention to extend treated water to communities outside the main towns. For visitors, neither report points to any disruption at hotels along the resort strip. Both remain single announcements carried by one outlet each, with no further figures published.