During the summer of 2007 we set a goal that our partners would build AguaClara water treatment plants to serve 10,000 people. Since then International Rural Water Association, IRWA, built a plant that is serving 5400 people in Marcala and Agua Para el Pueblo, APP, built a plant that is serving 3500 in Tamara. The $70,000 project was financed by nine Rotary Clubs with the Somers Rotary Club taking the lead. We succeeded in keepings costs below $20/person, a price that is lower than any other municipal scale water treatment technologies. In June I had the pleasure of participating in the inauguration ceremony for Tamara. Several hundred people came for the festivities. My favorite ceremony was a toast and a good drink of water made by the plant.
APP has requested that we further refine our design to create an ultra-low cost municipal water treatment plant. For our Fall 2008 project we are taking on this challenge. We are designing an innovative water treatment plant with shallower tanks for Cuatro Comunidades, a community near Tegucigalpa. Thanks to our contributors we have raised $50,000 to build this full scale pilot facility. We recently had the 'Groundbreaking' event for construction of the plant. We have already tested the shallow tank design at pilot scale in our facility at the Cornell University Filtration Plant and are confident that we can produce safe drinking water at full scale.
Our new design includes several innovations that will make it possible to build water treatment plants that are so economical that many more poor communities will be able to afford the plants.
Through generous support from the Sanjuan Fund, we have two AguaClara AguaClara Engineers, John Erickson and Tamar Maya Sharabi, who are on assignment in Honduras for a full year starting in August, 2008.
From January 4 to 20, 2008, 18 members of the AguaClara team traveled to Honduras to work on the water treatment project. Anne Ju, a reporter for the Cornell Chronicle spent one of those weeks in Honduras covering the successes of the project. Six of her articles on AguaClara have appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.