Engineers without Borders

Engineers without Borders USA went to Ecuador thinking they would build showers. They found bigger problems:

“We went down there thinking we needed to build a shower and found out that hundreds of people and dozens of homes had no clean water at all. The school cook would get water from a mud puddle then boil it to prepare lunch. The community was dissolving because crops were also failing,” he adds.

...They focused on the potable-water system first. “The town had a crude system in place that was poorly designed and broken. Underground plastic pipes ran from the mountain springs but were buried in shallow plots, and often disturbed by local farmers, causing leaking and contamination,” says Mapes.

...So the group mapped the terrain to find the best route for new diverted water lines, and created additional tanks to serve as pressure breaks and points of distribution for multiple lines.

Mapes says one of the more interesting parts of the project was the way EWB-USA engineers built the tanks... from reusable concrete forms...

When the group got to Ecuador they figured out how to make the first tank, then trained a group of locals called the Maestros. “They essentially built the second tank themselves,” adds Mapes. The reusable forms can be used 100 to 150 times, so now the Maestros can build tanks when EWB-USA is not there. “We worked with these newly trained ‘water experts’ on how to prioritize where the tanks should be built.” Mapes hopes the trained locals can help other villages in the surrounding area with the same problems, whether they actually make money or barter services.

Bottom Line: Give a man a bottle of water, he drinks it; teach him to build a water storage tank, and the whole community drinks!

hattip to NP