Carabuela Water Project

I wanted to begin to explain what I've been up to while I'm up here in Ecuador. I'm assisting two engineering students from the USA (Neal and Ryan) with an HCJB Global Community Development water project in the community of Carabuela. Carabuela is a highland community consisting of mostly ethnic Quichua working in the textile industry. Most homes weave sweaters, ponchos and woven goods to sell in both local and international markets. Beautiful colors and patterns abound. As does beautiful mountains and pastoral panoramas.

Carabuela's population is around 3,000 people. The community had an existing water system but it was not functioning well when they approached HCJB Global to help in 2005. Things have been slowly improving ever since. Currently the system is providing much improved water to the majority of the residents through mostly new pipes with residential water meters in most houses.

The water comes from about a half-dozen various springs that are gathered in holding a large, underground holding tank(under this building and one other) and then pumped up (this is the pump--20 horse power mas o menos)to a large tank an the top of a nearby hill. This water is then gravity fed to both the higher houses and other reservoirs that sit lower in order to avoid overly-high pressures in the system.

What we are trying to do is add a chlorine disinfection system to remove the bacteria load from the system. This involves two points where the chlorine will be added from a concentrated tank into the water system based on the flow rates. The ideal is to have a ratio of about one part chlorine per million parts of water. This would be essentially equivalent to most residential water systems in the US. Of course things aren't going as smoothly as we would like, but such is the pace of community development most times.