Work Update 2.2

Continuation of Part 2.1 - Semesche:

I wanted to give you a visual of the work here in the valley.  The picture below is a picture of a map that I found in the Puesto de Salud (Health Center) in Semesche.  It has lots of helpful information on it that we are using, but for a spacial reasoning geek (me), I like to know "actual" distances and how high things are.  So...

The next picture shows the same village in Google Earth with points that we have taken with the GPS.  In the top left you will see (SEM SPRING LARGE) a point that is the spring we will be using for this project.  Towards the right, you can see the access points that we will be providing, mostly at churches, for this phase of the project.  We use Google Earth a lot (mainly because it's free) to determine distances and plot rough profiles of the terrain.  We have found that its elevations are often off and not all that consistent, so we use the GPS (with an altimeter) to verify high and low points along the routes of our designs.  

The next step is to determine how large the lines need to be in the system to provide the water a village will use.  We have been consulting reference materials to determine average usage rates for families in rural communities.  We plug the pipes, tanks, and usage (flow rates) required into a model to verify that our design will work both now and if the community were to decide to expand their coverage to each house at some point in the future.  The picture below shows the modeling work I have been working on the past two days in Semesche to determine line sizes that will work if they decide to provide water to each home.  I am thankful for free water modeling software from EPA (your tax dollars at work).  I have traditionally used much more sophisticated programs in the consulting world, but this one is getting the job done.  From the modeling, we were able to determine that by increasing one section of pipe from 2" to 3" we could eliminate the need for an additional tank when expanding the system to 60 of the families to the northeast.  The cost to increase the line size now is one-fourth to a third the cost of having to build the tank. 

2.2 Sequixpur:

The second project I have been working on is to improve an existing water system in the village of Sequixpur (pictured below).  This system was built in the mid to late 1990's for several villages, including Semesche ironically, but because of poor maintenance or funds to fix breaks, the majority of the system stopped working shortly after it was built.  Sequixpur is the highest and closest village to the supply springs and has remained working because the main break that caused the failure is downstream from them.  Since the project was constructed the village has expanded but there has been no expansion of the system to serve these new homes.  We are planning to expand their system to serve those who have no water. The picture below shows Sequixpur in Google Earth.  The blue lines show the existing system and the red and purple lines show our planned expansion.  

I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post, but the significance of the Sequixpur system to the whole valley is that the springs that feed this system have more water than can ever be used by just Sequixpur.  The springs are of good quality and are very high - which allows us to push this water to several other villages that have no good water sources near their communities.  This thought is massive when compared to the scale of what we are doing in Semesche, but is the kind of infrastructure planning that has provided all of us in the states with reliable, clean drinking water every day. I will be spending a lot of time in Sequixpur between now and when we head home for Christmas, working out the details of this design.  We hope that a team from Knox ProCorps will be coming in February to construct this project.

In 2.3, maybe next week, I will try to describe the "BIG" vision of providing water to each home in the Ulpan Valley.  "Good water, for everyone, everday!"

Hasta Luego,

Mark