Heading Back to Isla Popa

So, after a nearly 10 months hiatus I am returning to the blogosphere. EWB-RPI and I are full speed ahead to return to Isla Popa in Panama to expand upon last January's project. Getting to this point has taken a tremendous amount of effort by a handful of dedicated people with a few ups and downs. I will provide a quick synopsis of the past 10 months and then 'splain where things stand right now, and then talk about footwear.

MIKE

After we got back from Panama in mid-January Scott (Underhill, my co-mentor) and I returned to our busy work schedules and our student companions resumed their classes. It appears Scott scored a serious coup by getting Kyle Geisler in to AECOM as an intern while he completes his co-op program for his combined Bachelors and Masters degrees. Mike Kubista took over as project lead to develop the next phase of the project. What did appear to be fairly apparent was that the folks on Isla Popa did not like the individual biosand filters and basically, had no intentions of using them. This factored largely in the development of what we thought would be the new project, but I get ahead of myself. 

In mid-March the gang came down to Kingston from Troy and we held a dinner fundraising program at the YMCA. It featured multiple slide presentations and a catered buffet dinner; it was very well attended and the students did a great job presenting and narrating the slides. Overall, it was a very successful evening, and aside from raising money, generated a good amount of "buzz" in the community.

Throughout the late winter and spring the group developed the next phase of the project which was to design and install a second rooftop rain collection system on the roof of the school kitchen ("comedor") building with an integrated slow sand filtration system connected to internal plumbing to essentially provide filtered clean "tap" water on demand.  Design of such as system was seriously constrained by the fact that the entire system had to be a gravity-flow system with the roof of the building between 8 and 9 feet above the ground level. The inherent difficulties with this lead us to look at a number of different design options, one of which was to eliminate sand filtration and return to the idea of chlorination. As events would later show, this proved to be a fortuitous development.

 The semester ended and most of the students headed out, either back to their homes, or to summer internships. Mike stayed behind to do research and he and I took over the weekly (or so) calls to Ambrosio to maintain contact and keep him up to date with the plans as they progressed. Ambrosio was very enthusiastic about the plans for the new project and we really began to develop a good rapport as we moved (so we thought) forward.

AMBROSIO

The students returned to campus in late August and by early September the preliminary plans for the new system were submitted to EWB national headquarter in the form of the "524" document. The 524 submission was followed by a conference call with the coordinating engineer from HQ who queried the current water situation. The decision came down in late September that the current system was adequate in terms of provision of water and that the group should refocus their effort on quality, not quantity. While I agree with the need to improve the quality of the current stored water, I also strongly believe that the community on Isla Popa still requires greater water acquisition and storage capacity than it currently enjoys. (I will discuss this in greater detail at a later writing). The saving grace in all of this is that when we made the move away from sand filtration to chlorination it became apparent that such as system would be a relatively straightforward retrofit onto the previously installed system. When HQ (aka National) KO'd the new system on the kitchen building the default plan became the addition of a pair of 55 gallon drums to the current pair of 600 gallon tanks to act as reservoirs for chlorination of water coupled with education and training in water disinfection practices. It is certainly a smaller scale project than originally planned, but it goes a long way in improving the quality and safety of the current drinking water. Still, it sent us several giant steps backward and Mike and the team had to scramble to revise the documentation in order to meet several tight deadlines. We currently have cleared most of these hurdles and have tentative approval to proceed.

And that's where I will leave it for now with a promise to write more later. And discuss footwear.