Clear Water Solutions

For years, water treatment solutions among villages in rural Honduras were as murky as the water that was coming out of the crude pumping systems. In a town that lay a few hours outside of the capital Tegucigalpa, houses scattered across the arid, mountainous landscape amazingly had running water. Yet what was even more astounding, was that this water - the water people paid to have access to every month - was coming out brown. Why bother with installing a plumbing system if people are going to buy bottled water anyways because the tap water is too dirty to use?

Among these rural towns that had running water, the water came directly from the river or lake and gave many people dysentery diseases and skin conditions. Flakes of dirt, debris, and bacteria visibly swam in the water. Yet no one did anything. It was just how things were.

Until Monroe Weber-Shirk, a civil engineering professor at Cornell University, headed South with his innovative ideas. Weber-Shirk designed a water treatment system that is able to both filter out debris and disinfect the water with chlorine using no electricity or outside power source. Since 2007, Weber-Shirk, his teams of Cornell students, and the local NGO partner, Agua Para el Pueblo (APP), have brought water treatment plants to 5 communities in Honduras.

Amanda and I were lucky enough to spend this last week getting an inside view of Weber-Shirk's organization AguaClara. We couchsurfed with Cornell grad '06 and Fulbright Scholar Dan Smith, who is working directly with both AguaClara and APP. We were able to personally visit 3 of the water treatment plants and see how simple water can be cleaned, purified, and distributed.

All of the systems work off of the principle of gravity. The steep mountainous terrain of Honduras provides the perfect location for this system. In all of the towns, the water is pumped from a nearby lake or river and flows into a holding tank, where the water is first treated with polyaluminum chloride. Without getting too technical, this chemical acts as a coagulate which makes the dirt molecules bond together.

The water then passes into a floculation tank which helps bind the debris together into bigger particles. The water, all flowing via gravity, next passes into the settling tank where the chunks of matter settle to the bottom. The water at this point (about 3 hours later) is very clear. It is lastly treated with chlorine to disinfect any bacteria.

The entire system is constructed from parts available in Tegucigalpa. The treatment plants are all operated by locals. E.i. the system is sustainable. The people are now paying $2-$4 a month to have clean and disinfected water. We spoke to a local nurse in the town of Agalteca, who reported that cases of dysentery in children under 5 have been cut in half since the water treatment plant was installed 6 months ago.

In less than 5 years, AguaClara has already touched the lives of 14,700 people, and has plans to build two more plants in the near future. And with start up costs of $40,000 to $60,000 depending on the size of the plant and the town's population, the real question is not if the plant is working or if it is worth it, but rather how has something like this not happened sooner?

A few thoughts to chew on:

Approximately 100,000, 000 people are living with water systems that are daily distributing untreated water directly to household taps. (Pulled from AguaClara's website.)

Water usage in Honduras is estimated at 50 gallons per person per day. In the U.S. water usage is 200 gallons per person per day.