Description of Project: Our goal is to provide the town of Arada Vieja with a sustainable clean water source. The protection of the spring source, effective filtration, system maintenance, and in-depth community education are the main goals of this project. The next step is to assess and design protection for the spring that is the source of their water. Future goals also include extensive water quality testing to guarantee safety and cleanliness, and continued health surveys to ensure health benefits. 

Progress: In the past two years, 4 travel teams have visited Arada Vieja. Working with the community, we built three slow-sand filters and a fresh water storage tank in January 2007. A water board, consisting of four community members, was also created to oversee the project and perform necessary maintenance. We are constantly communicating with the water board to discuss progress and answer question about the system. In March 2007 we successfully installed a hydraulic RAM pump to provide a more easily accessible water source. In June 2007, working with the community, we finalized the slow-sand filters and got them running. We cleaned the entire system, and constructed a permanent lid for the clean-water storage tank. We also performed preliminary water quality tests. Total coliform counts were extremely high, and there were several counts of e-coli found in all of the samples.

Winter 2008: This past winter, a team of six students and Professor Durant went to El Salvador for two weeks. The implementation portion of this trip included constructing a concrete lid to protect the spring box from the environment, which had previously been open to the air. We focused heavily on health surveys, as a new health survey was formed during the fall semester that was more data oriented to better facilitate comparisons between trips. On the trip, we also did multiple water quality tests, testing not only for bacteria, but iron, phosphates, nitrates, turbidity, and pH. The results were astounding. All three filters were fully working at reducing the bacteria count from over 50 counts of total coliform to 0 per milliliter of water! Future trips will focus on ensuring it will stay this way.
 

Trip Reports: For more detailed information about each of our trips, including health survey results, water quality results, and construction diagrams and calculations, please feel free to download any of our trip reports (Word Documents):

• July 2006 - Assessment
• January 2007 - Implementation
• July 2007 - Implementation

 

Contacts: If you have any questions about our project please feel free to contact Jon Gregorowicz (Jonathan.Gregorowicz@tufts.edu) or Ilya Josefson (Ilya.Josefson@tufts.edu).