#Cuatro Comunidades
#Tamara
#Atima
#CCC Study
#Gracias
Cuatro Comunidades
Gustavo, the plant operator, continues to gain experience operating the plant. The incoming turbidity continued to drop this week, as it has not rained, but he continued to apply alum. We still have not seen any evidence of a floc blanket. Every couple days we have drained the floc hopper, but no sludge comes out. Since the turbidity has been low and the operation of the plant still a bit erratic, maybe it will take longer to form a floc blanket. The linear alum doser continues to work well. Thursday 4.23 we installed the chlorine flow control module inside of the plant at the end of the exit canal, moving it from the distribution tank. In the future we will need to shut down the plant to run a pipe from the entrance tank to the chlorine application point to install the doser that compensates for flowrate like the one we are using for the alum.
Thursday 4.23 we also met with Antonio Gomez, a resident who is active with the water board and lives in one of the last houses in the distribution system. We trained him to use the chlorine test kit and he agreed to take daily chlorine measurements in his house and notify Gustavo daily of the results. This will help Gustavo control the chlorine dose, since it is a half-hour walk from the plant to the last house in the system.
Tamara
We visited the plant Monday 4.20 and Carlos the operator was not applying alum. Incoming turbidity had dropped below 5 NTU. We met with Karin, the fontanero who is supposed to be taking daily chlorine measurements and communicating them to Carlos. He has daily data, but every day he writes the same exact measurement, so we doubt he is actually taking the measurements accurately. He also has not been communicating the results to Carlos. Antonio will work more closely with Karin to improve this situation. In the next month we would like to improve chlorine residual monitoring in Tamara, Ojojona and the Cuatro Communities, because it is probably the most important parameter we have to assess water quality and up until now the operators have been paying relatively little attention to it.
Friday 4.24 Antonio installed the linear flow orifice meter and finished the instalation of the linear dosing mechanism. When he left both were online and functioning.
Atima
A group of high school students in Atima is doing a project on water treatment for a science fair on Monday 5.4. They called us asking for directions to make a demo plant like the one we have. Since they only have a couple weeks for the project, we thought a demo plant would be too big of a project. We are suggesting that they make a depurador or conduct a spinning bottle test to show visitors to the fair how flocculation and sedimentation work. We will send instructions and a turbidimeter to help with the project, which should be a good way to promote the treatment plant in the community.
CCC Study
We met Tuesday 4.21 in the offices of the SANAA technicians to discuss how to proceed with the project. Even though we were supposed to start a month ago, monitoring has still not begun in some communities of the study. This is mainly due to the fact that the SANAA technicians have not had as much time to be in the communities as we had hoped. Further complicating the situation, they do not have funding to visit the communities until the beginning of May. We are concerned that by the time we get the study started it may be raining and the water may be too turbid for any chlorination to be effective. However, the technicians say that most of the communities have clear water even during the rainy season, so that should not be a problem. Since we have already promoted the project to the community and have invested some resources in the first phase, we decided that it's still worth continuing the study. We will meet Monday 5.4 to better plan how to restart the study once the SANAA technicians will be visiting the communities again.
Gracias
We finished the construction budget for Gracias this week. Wil was finishing up the drawings on Friday and we will send the budget and a set of drawings to Gracias on Monday 4.27.