At the conclusion of the chapel service when the administrator asked for announcements, I informed everyone that we were expecting that we would be ready today to turn off the water to the 5-in1's so we could cut the line and join the line from the new tower, and that they might want to draw water into buckets ahead of time so they would have it available until we could turn the water back on. There was both apprehension and concern. Everyone wanted to make sure all those living in the homes was notified.
Mrs. Narimba was one of the environmental health officers in Zimba when we were here three years ago and was around when we had tested water for e. coli before and when we had left the test kits. We had be unable to relocate the test kits in the environmental health office last week while Mrs. Narimba was away on holiday. She returned this weekend. After chapel I asked her if she remembered the test kits and if they were still available. Professor Rose at MSU had provided me with more packets of the reagents needed and a black light for testing water samples, but I still needed the information regarding the volume of water to add the reagents to and the temperature at which the samples are to be incubated and for what duration..
Mrs. Narimba remembered the kits and was confident they were in the environmental health office. We went to the office and located them fairly quickly. In fact we found the information for both the Colilert testing and the second kit for testing for hydrogen sulfide. I rejoined Jon and Bob and we turned on the pump to well 3 so we could draw a water sample and get it in the incubator. Jon and Bob had assembled the T-junction, extensions, valves and couplings and then attached it to the 50 mm pvc pipe. We wanted everything ready in advance of cutting the line so the length of time during which the water was cut off was minimized.
Last week when we were assessing the wells, we had turned on the pump on well 3 and pumped water into the tank on the new tower. We didn’t fill it but had put in quite a bit of water. Since we still weren’t sure how good the water is, we decided we should drain all the water out of the tank and then start afresh once the line is connected to the 5-in-1 line. So, we opened up the output valve a let the water run out onto the ground near the site where the junction would be made. We were all pleased and impressed with the volume and pressure of the water coming out of the open line, but we also thought it looked a little murky and smelled funny. About then, one of the local men who works at the eye clinic, Collins, came by and told us he’d heard birds by the tank and he thought the birds had built a nest in the tank because the lid had been left open when it was set up. The more water we let run out of the tank, the worse it smelled.
Elisha and Jon climbed the tower ladder and hauled a step ladder up so they could look in the tank. Elisha let us know he could see dead birds inside the tank and the odor was quite bad. He and Jon came down. We had to construct something to fish the dead animals out of the tank or the tank wouldn’t be useable at all. Jon and Elisha found a long fairly stiff plastic pipe and taped a number of course wires to the end of it that Elisha fashioned into a kind of rake. With this, sitting on top of the tank he was able to fish out the dead animals through the opening on the top of the tank. There were what appeared to be two adult hawks, one or two baby hawks, and three or four mice/rats the adults had brought for the babies to eat. It took him quite awhile to get them all out. By the time he had finished, it was time to break for lunch. No one was all that hungry, but we needed the break.
After ‘lunch,’ we thought we should try to get any other fragments or dirt out of the tank as well. We pumped more water into the tank and let it drain. Larry and Bob discussed with Dennis the possibility of making a fine meshed net that could be used to skim the water remaining in the tank. Dennis found some window screening. Larry and Bob found some small gauge wire for reinforcing concrete. They rolled it into a circle or tube, then took cut a piece of the screening and sewed it to wire frame with small lengths of wire. Then they wired this net to the long pole than Jon and Elisha had fashioned. (Bob and Larry have now been nominated for their 2011 McGyver Merit Badges as well).
Bob and Larry took this skimmer net up to the top of the tower. Larry sat on the top of the tank and repeatedly dipped the net into the tank skimming the water and the tank bottom trying to get all the debris out that he could. As he’d pull stuff out of the tank, he’d pass the net and pole to Bob who would empty the debris out of the net over the side of the tower and then pass the net back to Larry. This went on for at least an hour.
When we finally concluded we had done as much as we could, we decided to go to the market to buy chlorine or bleach to try to kill any bacteria in the tank and residual water. We were able to buy a box of 12 pints of chlorine each of which should be sufficient to sanitize 20 liters of water. There appeared to be 2-3 inches of residual water in the bottom of the tank. The tank was about 6 feet in diameter (we couldn’t make precise measurements on anything). So there is a formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder of a specified diameter and height (probably something like pi*r2*h) which would then have to be converted to liters. But we didn’t have the formula at the time or the measurements. In hindsight, we probably added enough chlorine to sanitize twice the volume of water as was actually in the tank, but that is OK given what was in there.
No comments:
Post a Comment