In Haiti, Oxfam’s job isn’t just providing water, but working together with the local people who’ll be drinking it, our staff are ensuring its ongoing quality. Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort.
Six months ago, Tom Mahin’s focus was figuring out how to improve the quality of drinking water in the Massachusetts city of Gloucester. The city’s 30,000 residents had been told to boil their tap water before drinking it due to high levels of harmful bacteria. Mahin is a drinking water specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and is working as an advisor to Oxfam America in Haiti.
Because of the urgent need, Oxfam chose this camp to be the first to receive one of ten bladders — rubber tanks resembling big pillows — that hold about 2,900 gallons of water each. Until now the 1,482 people in this densely populated location close to the city centre were venturing out as far as a kilometre for drinking water. Today, for the first time since the earthquake on 12 January, 340 displaced families in Impasse Fouget, Port-au-Prince, have safe drinking water, thanks to Mahin and Haitian engineer Donald St. Preux.
Oxfam’s job is not only to provide water, but to ensure its quality, all with the participation of the people who will be drinking it.
How to build a ten tonne water bladder
At Impasse Fouget, our first task was to build a large platform with rubble, rocks, and earth on which the bladder would rest. A bladder like this, filled with water, weighs ten tonnes, so the platform has to be well constructed–a task that community members took on, with no request for payment. A flexible pipe running to a set of five outdoor taps carries the water from bladder down to where people can collect it.
Chlorinating water ensures its safety — and Oxfam works to reinforce that idea through hygiene promotion activities in the camps. When a delivery truck comes to fill the bladder, chlorine is added, a responsibility we have given to local users who have selected a water committee to carry it out. Mahin provides bottles of a 1% chlorine solution (quite safe — household bleach is six percent) to a committee member who adds it to the bladder. An Oxfam engineer, working with the same handheld meter used by water authorities in the US, monitors the chlorine level to determine whether it’s appropriate, and can adjust the concentration if necessary.
Oxfam is working in camps of many sizes, from a few hundred people to many thousands. Our team’s focus is on 35 smaller encampments in the Delmas district. Between 200 and 2,100 people might reside in each. Working at this scale makes our community-based approach for chlorination effective.
A test of the water emerging from the tank at Impasse Fouget showed an acceptable residual chlorine level of 2mg/litre — enough to ensure any bugs in the water would be killed, but not enough to be tasted except by the most sensitive palate.
Mahin’s with us for a couple of weeks, and by the time he returns to Boston he will have helped to bring safe water to more than 12,000 people — almost half the number who live in Gloucester.
Find out more about Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake response
This article was originally posted on the Oxfam America blog.