[[Image:CT icon.png|right|80px]]
[[Image:plant Iraq.jpg|thumb|right|350px200px|In 2007, over 3,000,000 people benefited directly from the [http://www.icrc.org/eng/index.jsp ICRC’s] repairs, renovations and upgrades of water storage and delivery systems in Iraq, Basra. Here, they are renovating a water-treatment plant. Photo: [http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/photo-gallery/photos-water-habitat-170308.htm © ICRC / irak.]]][[Image:water treatment plant.gif|thumb|right|350px200px|In 2001 CESO Adviser Jake Dick travelled to Santa Rosa de Copan, a city nestled in the western mountains of Honduras, to restore an abandoned water-treatment plant to functionality. <br>Photo: [http://www.ceso-saco.com/About/News/2010/Water-Story-Title.aspx Ceso/Saco.]]]__NOTOC__<small-title />
In this strategy, the population is supplied with drinking water from large, centralised water treatment plants. The treated water is piped to all the communities in the geographical area served by the treatment plant, thus requiring an extensive pipe network, so as to reach even the most remote communities. The treatment plants could be managed and operated by the larger municipalities or, more likely, by the Water Boards in that region. Generally, these plants should be well managed and operated effectively due to availability of sufficient O&M funds and qualified human resources.
Centralised water treatment and a piped distribution network have had a mixed history primarily due to high initial costs and operation and maintenance, inadequate access to training, management and finance sufficient to support a fairly complex system for the long term. These complete systems are also slow to be implemented so waterborne disease continues in the interim.
===Construction, operations and maintenance===
'''Comparing centralised plants with decentralised plants'''<br>
For decentralised treatment systems, the use of automated more sophisticated systems operated and maintained under contract by reputable water treatment companies are therefore likely to present a “best” treatment option in terms of performance, compliance and sustainability.
===Costs===
* Centralized water treatment plants cost around $700 per family, making them prohibitively expensive for developing countries to build.
===Acknowledgements===
* J.M. Arnalà , B. Garcia-Fayos, G. Verdu, J. Lora. [http://www.journalogy.net/Publication/22912554/ultrafiltration-as-an-alternative-membrane-technology-to-obtain-safe-drinking-water-from-surface Ultrafiltration as an alternative membrane technology to obtain safe drinking water from surface water: 10 years of experience on the scope of the AQUAPOT project.] Polytechnic University of Valencia, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department, Camino de Vera s/n 46022 Valencia, Spain. May 2008.
