Saudi Gazette report

MAKKAH — The distribution of bottles of Zamzam water will resume from King Abdullah Project for Zamzam Water in Kudai in Makkah from Tuesday, March 23. This was announced by Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, head of the Presidency for the Affairs of Two Holy Mosques and chairman of the Project’s Supervisory Committee.

Sheikh Al-Sudais said the National Water Company, the official operator of the Project, would start receiving visitors and those who want to buy the blessed water from the Project, as part of the elaborate preparations to meet the growing demand for the holy water on the advent of the fasting month of Ramadan.

The Zamzam water distribution will be held for a few hours starting from 1:00 p.m. till 9 p.m. all days except Friday, he said.

The Supervisory Committee has completed all precautionary measures and preventive protocols to ensure the safety of the visitors from coronavirus. The price of five-liter bottle is SR5.5, inclusive of the value added tax (VAT). The quota of the holy water for each person will be four bottles after every 15 days.

There will be priority with designated selling points for people with special needs. The maximum number of customers allowed to enter the customer care center of the Project at a time during working hours will be 60.

The committee said in a statement, carried by Saudi Press Agency, that the bottles of Zamzam water can be collected from the Project headquarters, as well as from hypermarkets and super stores with whom contracts were concluded earlier to distribute the holy water through their outlets across the Kingdom, in addition to the application Irwaa.

The hypermarkets and stores are being supplied with more than five million bottles of Zamzam water for distribution.

The project is using highly advanced technology to make available the holy water, while preserving its purity and unique quality, to the largest number of pilgrims and visitors to the Grand Mosque in Makkah and the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah.

The late King Abdullah inaugurated the automated project, built at a cost of SR700 million, in Sept. 2010.

The project includes 42 distribution points at its headquarters in Kudai, providing Zamzam water bottles around the clock. The holy water is pumped from the well to the project for purification and sterilization through filtering at its purification plant by employing high tech methodology.

After the purification process, the water is pumped to the huge tanks in Kudai and at King Abdulaziz Sabeel point (public Zamzam supply outlet). The bottled Zamzam conforms to the highest degree of purification, packing, storage and automatic distribution in line with the latest means and methods of global technology.

The holy water supplied at the Grand Mosque is from the Kudai tank while the water carried by trucks to the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah is from the Sabeel tank.

There are tanks with a capacity of 10,000 cubic meters of the holy water at the project. The bottling plant consists of several buildings with high tech facilities, and these buildings include one for production line and warehouse of bottles, in addition to emergency station buildings.

The length of pipelines from the Zamzam well to Kudai project is one kilometer. There are two giant pumps to pump the holy water from the well to the project. The Zamzam Well is located within the Grand Mosque, 21 meters east of the Holy Kaaba and its opening is 1.56 meter below mataf (circumambulation area around the Holy Kaaba) surface.