Day 5 - Almost the End
Thursday marked the team's last full day working in Chuchurras. After breakfast and making the trek from Iscozacín, the EWB members arrived to find the community volunteers and heavy machinery toiling to dig the trenches and set in place the distribution piping.
The EWB team split into a couple of groups, one handling the distribution system work and the other handling the aspects of operator training at the well.
Today the distribution system work required a road crossing and a stream crossing. For dramatic effect, we’ll note that the stream is a tributary to the Amazon River. Despite that, things are different here in rural Peru, and we didn’t need any water resources permits or to provide advanced notice to any road authorities. If there’s construction on a road, the vehicles simply stop and wait until it’s open again. Rena and Paige led the charge working with the community again today, with help from Brian Roth. We prefabricated the pipe segments for those locations yesterday, to ensure strong connections and expedite the crossings to limit traffic impacts.
In this part of the world, we’re extremely grateful for the backhoe and its operator, but the operator is young and learning, so we held off from requesting fancy water diversions and temporary dams for the stream crossing and opted for wet excavation with manual backfill. The community quickly got volunteers to work in the open water trench to ensure a level surface for the pipe and carefully backfill with sand and hand placed rocks. The community took immense pride in the work and worked with care to ensure the pipe was securely held down with rocks and protected prior to backfilling with the backhoe. Only one cargo truck had to wait a while for us to reopen the road!
Brian Rivers and Sara began Thursday's training session by reviewing the previous day's material covering the distribution system. Namely, we discussed what situations warrant shocking the well and disinfecting the distribution system.
Next, the training team walked up to the well and found Chris and Derek. Chris gave the operators a walk through of the well house interior, covering all the electrical and plumbing components installed within. A much more in-depth training may have been necessary to teach the operators about some of the automatic settings; however, due to some difficulties calibrating the pressure switch, operation of the system requires the system only to manually flip a power switch. Chris also guided the operators through a demonstration on how to properly apply Teflon tape.
After lunch, Brian Rivers, Derek, and Chris took some measurements of the well casing using an innovation of Derek's: a pipe fitting tied to a spool of string. When the operator team arrived, we began by discussing chlorine: how to properly handle it, what protective equipment to don, where to mix the solution, and how long to wait until adding it to the well. Brian helped demonstrate and later helped the operators practice these activities on their own, eventually pouring the solution into the well to trea the water.
Following a demonstration on how to use a hose attachment to clean the solar panels that may have left Derek drenched, the team walked back down to Santa Rosa to inspect and flush the newly laid pipe from Wednesday on the branch leading north out of Chuchurras. While inspecting the new tap stands and valves, the team discovered a defective ball valve but was able to get water flowing at another tap stand further down the distribution line.
Work continued throughout the rest of the day, until the backhoe had an issue with one of its belts around 4:30pm and we called it quits for the day and headed home. Later, we enjoyed a scrumptious supper at Pepe Grillo followed by some karaoke at the hotel, coordinated by Sarai.
Ahuerren (“see you later” in Yanesha)
~ Rena and Brian Rivers
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