Seeb Wilayat is one of Muscat's most populous areas and a major suburban district. Its large and diverse population of Omanis and expatriates makes it an important gateway for the region, blending modern infrastructure with traditional sites.
By 2040, Seeb will need water infrastructure that can serve a growing population around the clock. In preparation, the Oman Wastewater Services Company (OWWSC) set out to build storage and transmission capacity for this very future. The project is building a hydraulic backbone that can serve these projected growth statistics for the Seeb district.
Engicon's role is a 32-month supervision contract on the Seeb Water Network under a joint venture with Omani engineering firm Ibn Khaldun–Al Madaen.
Project Scale
The numbers tell part of the story. Nearly 508,000 cubic meters of new reservoir capacity spread across four compounds. Two transmission mains stretching over 13 kilometers through active city streets, and distribution reinforcement threading through neighborhoods, where excavators share space with school runs and delivery trucks.
The real story is what those numbers represent. OWWSC requires 48 hours of water security for Seeb's 2040 population. This is the minimum required water storage buffer should all pump stations fail simultaneously. It gives maintenance two days to remedy the situation to avoid a full-scale water crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of residents.
Getting there meant building seven 50,000-cubic-meter reservoirs at Al Khoud 6, three 35,000-cubic-meter tanks at Rusayl, a 15,000-cubic-meter reservoir at Mawaleh, and two more at Seeb Compound totaling 37,400 cubic meters. Each one had to integrate seamlessly with existing systems—same control protocols, same monitoring standards, same operational logic.
Inside the Supervision Workload
When a contractor's drawings show a transmission line crossing under a highway, supervision is the team that ensures trial pits get dug first. This can map the exact tracks of electrical conduits and telecom cables, and where the old storm drain nobody remembered is sitting two meters down. It saves residents from having to call for maintenance works on a severed fiber-optic line, for example.
The contract requires cathodic protection for steel pipes. The JV ensured soil resistivity testing happened along the entire route—actual measurements, not assumptions. This matched the cathodic protection design to the actual ground conditions the pipe would experience. Corrosion doesn't care about specifications; it cares about electrochemistry.
When pump stations get upgraded, supervision verifies the surge protection. The two 80-cubic-meter surge vessels on the Seeb-to-Area-7 line are there to absorb the pressure spike when the pumps shut down unexpectedly. Size them wrong, and six months later you're replacing burst pipes. The JV's role was making sure the installed equipment matched what the calculations said it should be—before the system went live, not after something failed.
The most critical supervision work is often invisible to anyone not on site. Every new reservoir in this project includes a Reservoir Leak Detection System (RLDS). This is not just leak detection as a concept but a functioning system tied into local logic controllers that feed real-time data to regional and national control centers.
Supervision means witnessing those loop checks. Verifying that when a sensor trips in Rusayl, the right alarm appears on the right screen at the corresponding control center. The alarm also has to be meaningful, not just one of the nuisance alerts that operators have learned to ignore. It means rationalizing alarms so that a signal doesn't drown in noise. The operators should be able to validate cause-and-effect matrices when something goes wrong at any time of the day.
The transmission lines carry fiber-optic intrusion monitoring and leak detection systems built to OWWSC's high standards. That means leak location accurate to meters, not districts, using sensors that are calibrated, tested, and integrated into a monitoring regime. Supervision is the bridge between installed hardware and operational capability.
The bustling district of Seeb required that the two transmission mains be built alongside and underneath roads carrying daily traffic. Microtunnelling kept the busy roads open during crossings. Smaller roads allowed open trenching: faster work, manageable disruption, and no neighborhood gridlock.
Documentation That Means Something
A project can be measured by what goes in the ground, but it's delivered by what goes in the record. The JV's monthly reports weren't just progress narratives; they included detailed valuations, resource tracking, and dated photographs, submitted 72 hours before recurring meetings so OWWSC's team had time to read, not just react.
The Completion & Asset Register Reports delivered a georeferenced inventory of every structure, valve, flow meter, and monitoring point accepted into operation. This means future operators don't have to guess where things are or wonder what got installed. The record matches the ground.
SCADA points map exactly to physical assets. Surge protection reads correctly in both transient models and reality. Reservoir leak detection systems report, rather than exist as as-built notes. That's the connective tissue Engicon brought—a reduction in friction.
The Human Element
Staffing rules in supervision contracts exist for a reason. The JV deployed personnel on an agreed schedule, with CVs and competence verified upfront. OWWSC retained the right to request substitutions with 30 days' notice if anyone proved unsuitable.
That structure delivers continuity. Inspectors and discipline lead who know yesterday's weld, today's concrete pour, and tomorrow's energization plan. Who understands the site's rhythm and can spot when something's off before it becomes a problem.
Head office support—contract managers, electrical and mechanical specialists, quantity surveyors—backed the site team without appearing in daily logs. The cost was embedded in staff rates, not tacked on as extras. That's how you keep a supervision spine straight over 32 months.
When the Seeb Water Network is complete, OWWSC will operate reservoirs with real-time leak monitoring, transmission lines with pinpoint intrusion detection, and pump stations protected by both surge vessels and condition monitoring. They'll have distribution reinforcement that threads through Al Khoud and Mabelah South without future utility conflicts, because those conflicts were engineered out during construction.
Supervision doesn't build projects—contractors do. But supervision is what stands between design intent and operational reality, making sure the infrastructure that keeps a city running actually works the way it was designed.
That's what the Ibn Khaldun–Al Madaen–Engicon Joint Venture delivers.
