Cuatro Comunidades

Construction continues to progress well. Nearly all of the bricks are laid for the tank walls and they have begun to build the foundations for the chemical tables. Materials for the floc and sed modules should arrive next week to be ready for when the Cornell group comes down in January.

Tamara

As of Thursday 12.11, pproximately 150 gpm were arriving to the plant from La Chorrera. Earlier in the week the Junta had fixed a broken pipe in the conduction line. With the Manzanal and La Chorrera, so much flowrate is arriving that the new pressure-break box that the Junta built is overflowing because there is not enough capacity in the pipe from the box to the plant to carry all of the water. However, 180 gpm are arriving to the plant, which is nearly full capacity and should be plenty to supply the community. The Junta will need shut off the Manzanal or devise a way to reduce flow from La Chorrera to prevent the pressure-break box from overflowing, since this overflow will cause erosion.

With Engineer Wil, we revised the design for the conduction line and found quite a few inconsistencies. It appears that the first part of the line should have capacity for 175 gpm and the rest has capacity for about 210 gpm. When we visited La Chorrera last week, only 108 gpm were passing through the first section. More than that is now arriving to the plant, but the increase could be due to extra flowrate introduced later in the line through a connection the the Penitentiary conduction line. The reduced flow could be due to the lack of a cleaning valve at an early low spot in the conduction line.

Although the current situation of the conduction line has improved quite a bit, furthur study of the line would be helpful to prevent problems in the future and to insure that once they are unable to inject water from the penitentiary's line there will still be suficient flowrate.

With the new high flow, the plant was functioning Thrusday, but not optimally. Thursday the incoming turbidity was 10 NTU and the outgoing 5 or 6 NTU. We thought the high effluent turbidity was due to dirty sed tanks and some clogged sed tank entrance tubes. Flocs were forming, but relatively small ones. The plant seems to form better flocs when the flowrate is well below the design flow. However, when the flow is too low (40 gpm) Carlos is not able to form flocs, so there is a lower limit.

Friday _________________________________________________. (ball valve, plant cleaing, performance afterward)

Flow Control Modules

As suggested by Scott, Antonio rotated the float 180 degrees in the Ojojona and Tamara flow control modules. We will monitor these modules over the next weeks to see whether they clog less than they did previously.

Promotion of New Projects

We mentioned IAF (Inter-American Fountation) to Jacobo and Arturo, but they said it would not be a viable funding source for AguaClara. First, APP has already recieved millions of dollars in funding from IAF and they said that they won't be able to receive any more in the near future. Second, they said that IAF normally does not provide much funding for water infrastructure projects like AguaClara. Normally they are looking for grass-roots initiatives.

Jacobo thinks tha SETCO, a Honduran governmental organization that uses international donations to fund infrastructure projects, could be a very good funding source for AguaClara. They only provide funds for materials, but that would still be a significant help. They could provide similar support to what Alianza para el Agua is providing for the 4 Communities plant. In some cases, the municipality would likely be able to find the rest of the funding. We plan to make proposals to SETCO for plants in Agalteca and Guaimaca. Gracias, Lempira could also be a good project for SETCO, once we have reliable turbidity data from there and know how the treatment plant will fit into other improvements they plan to make to the water system.