Hose it going?

lunes 23 julio

The little ute that could!

We kicked off our second last day with our final visit to Pista Nueva, the street that has all the hardware ‘shops’. We bought six 100m rolls of common garden hose to connect our fog collectors to the existing collection tanks so the yield could be measured easily and continuously once we leave. Victor went out into the street and found us a man with a ute who could drive us all up the hill 50 soles.

The two hoses sitting in their freshly dug trench

The original plan for the hose- across to PEBAL's fog collectors

Once there we found Raul, and Freddy, plus some other dudes from the community (Armand and Fermin) who came along to help. We’ve noticed that the days we have to build/ carry heavy stuff up the hill it’s always a clear blue sky with a blazing hot sun! Special thanks to Katherine (a friend from my volunteering days in 2010) and her mate Israel who (by some miracle) found their way to our project site and helped to lay the pipeline!

You can see all the way to the sea!!

 With the first stretch of trench picked out by Andy, Armand, Freddy and Raul, we popped the hose in and buried as much as we could before 2pm as we had to leave to prepare for a presentation to PEBAL at 4pm.

After hurriedly getting home, showering, scoffing lunch and fixing up our semi-finished presentation, we made our way to PEBAL headquarters to meet the director and several engineers, scientists and support staff of PEBAL. We were to present the process undertaken in our project and the results of our investigation. In Spanish… which was ok till they started asking technical questions...thanks for the translations Kat!

Presentation to PEBAL

 I think PEBAL’s staff were impressed with our results (we’ve collected more water per square metre in the last two weeks than their project) and were interested in the benefits of using our location and design in their next project instead. They said they’d continue to monitor our results and if they’re looking good after the next few months potentially even start work on more fog collectors there! The director Ofelia was also very keen to get a Kestrel 4500 for PEBAL to better assess new locations for fog collection projects according to wind direction, speed and altitude.

And remember how one of their fog collectors had broken? Well, at the end of the presentation Luis asked us to give them advice on changes they should make when they rebuild it. Based on our investigation (and all the research we’d done at home first), we recommended that having the base of the mesh higher above the ground was beneficial as the fog is denser higher up (and the wind is faster), and also to use a wider piece of piping for the collection gutter to catch fly-away droplets in high wind (and accordingly donated the other half of our 6” diameter PVC pipe). It was awesome to feel like consulting engineers!!

Happy Birthday Luis!

After the presentation and discussion we were treated to ham and cheese sandwiches, Inca Kola and cake for Luis’ birthday!! Feliz Cumpleaños Luis

Angela (PEBAL's environmental engineer) telling me about their 'Humedal' project

Luis telling Kat and Israel about their fog collecting project

 So tomorrow we’re getting up super early to finish up the trench digging and hose burying and talk with the community a bit more about what’s happening next- just generally wrapping things up before we leave on Wednesday. Bueno. Hasta luego chicos.