Honduras Interns Progress Report
Date: 11/19/07
Location: Ojojona
Work Completed This Week
¿ Improvements to Plant
o Abrassaderas to the plant have been installed and now all chemical barrels drain to the same location as the overflow.
¿ Progress in Problem Solving
o We have put in the three tube drainage system for the sedimentation tanks. We ended up putting 10 holes on top of every tube, and 9 on each side for a total of 28 on each tube and 84 in total. Twice we have opened the drain but haven´t had any dirty water come out. This is party due to the low turbidity that is coming into the plant. Below 10 for the last couple of weeks.
¿ Ojojona
o Asamblea´s
¿ Meeting with the leaders of barrios for Ojojona kind of fell flat. Only about 10 of the 60 that were invited showed up. We did the presentation of the plant and the raise in tariff and all those that were present seemed in favor. We have scheduled meetings by barrios for the following Saturday and Sunday the 24th and 25th of November and the following weekend. There are four barrios in total. The Junta should be sending out invites today.
o Capacitation of plant operators, Sustainability
¿ We have been doing a lot of travelling and so haven´t been at the plant as much. The past two weeks have been pretty successful. The turbidity hasn´t been changing that much, it rained once and the turbidity rose to about 13. We are thinking about removing sulfate soon because the turbidity has been low (4-5 NTU). John will send the plant log.
¿ Manual
o Just got sent! Please let us know what you think. We tried to make everything as simple and basic as we could with lots of pictures.
¿ Tamara
o The Junta at Tamara had a general meeting on Saturday the 10th of November to discuss the plant and the raise in the tariff. We did a presentation about the plant and about what would go into raising the tariff. There were some good general questions about the plant and the people seemed receptive. About 70 people showed up for the meeting. At the end of the meeting they had everyone who was in favor of having the plant raise their hand, and most people did. Naman (eng. For APP) has a picture of it, though i´m not sure how much you can see.
o On Tuesday the 13th of November we went to Tamara to check out the viability of adding the community La Flor. We took the GPS and do not have too much faith in the data so we are going back on Tuesday the 20th of November to redo the elevations with the GPS and an altimeter. The following is what we found out last Tuesday:
¿ The distribution tank for La Flor is 10 meters higher than the distribution tank for Tamara. There are two solutions to this problem
¿ It could be possible to move the plant up about 15 meters (elevation) from the tanks at Tamara (like 200 meters distance, walking). One thing to be cautions about is that the second source la manzanal comes in only about a few meters before where the plant would be, which shouldn´t affect anything too much there should still be enough difference in elevation for the manzanal.
¿ Tamara has three tanks, one that it doesn´t use. This could be rehabilitated and used to send water to La Flor. If this was the case then the water would skip the distribution tank for La Flor and 4 houses.
¿ Plans for the Future
o Go to Tamara on Tuesday the 20th of November
¿ Get more precise elevations on La Flor and tanks.
¿ Get information about health and a basic line of information on the community.
o We hope to have a meeting the 14th and 15th of December to officially hand over the Ojojona water treatement plant to the Junta. A summary of this meeting will come in another e-mail entitled "Meeting with Jacobo and Arturo"