Press Release: Cuatro Communidades
AguaClara is a project in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, open source engineering, and design of sustainable, replicable water treatment systems. The AguaClara Project involves students, professors and international NGOs working on providing clean and affordable, treated water to Honduras's communities most impoverished regions since 2004.
Since 2005 the AguaClara team and Honduran NGOs designed and built water treatment plants that collectively serve 13,000 people across Honduras. Two of these plants were completed in Tamara and Marcala in summer 2008. A new water treatment plant located outside Tegucigalpa that will treat water for four communities will raise to over 15,000 people the population benefiting from the work done at Cornell and in Honduras. The local NGO Agua Para el Pueblo (APP), which the Cornell Team partners with in Honduras, plans on inaugurating the Four Communities' water treatment plant in April of 2009.
The Four Communities' plant was designed by the AguaClara team to include several innovations that improve performance and at the same time reduce construction costs. These design changes were made at the request of APP, in an effort to reduce the design/build/train/operate/transfer costs to below $20 per person served. The new design maximizes the use of components that are fabricated on site rather than reliance on PVC piping. Dr. Monroe Weber-Shirk, the project advisor and founder of AguaClara, says that because the construction of the new plants is more economical, more communities will be able to afford the cost of construction.
AguaClara was developed in part from the desire to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of reducing child mortality and ensuring environmental sustainability. Water-borne diseases are one of the top causes of childhood mortality worldwide. Unsafe drinking water causes diarrheal diseases, which are responsible for the deaths of about 5,000 children every day. AguaClara implements the treatment processes of flocculation, floc-blanket filtration, and sedimentation, without the need for fossil-fuels or electricity. These processes remove particulate matter from surface waters so that chlorination can effectively kill water-borne pathogens such as cholera and E. coli.
AguaClara plants are designed to meet the need for robust, sustainable water treatment plants in towns and cities between 1,000 and 50,000 people. With an estimated global need of over 100 million people in this category, the AguaClara team is anticipating expanding to additional countries. The social networks being developed in Honduras will lay groundwork for expanding the efforts to build future plants in other countries across Latin America and around the globe.
In January 2009, 20 members of the AguaClara team traveled to Honduras to check on the progress of the plants as well as to establish new goals for the next year. The team is currently designing facilities for three cities in Honduras (populations 2,000; 10,000; and 20,000), and for a pilot facility in Ecuador. Six research teams are furthering understanding of the core unit processes.
The team meets as a registered class; conducts research design, and fundraising; and it is the full-time commitment to the project that is the crux of its success. Dr. Weber-Shirk said that as the AguaClara project grows, its need expands for students and faculty from across the university to contribute in new and innovative ways. An AguaClara student organization is currently forming, and students interested in helping with the project are encouraged to check out the website: AguaClara.cee.cornell.edu