The Catholic University of America

Club Information

The Catholic University of America student chapter of Engineers without borders is currently working with the Washington DC professional chapter to develop a water distribution system in the town of Santa Clara El-Salvador.

Background

Santa Clara, El Salvador:

  • Active pursuit of a way to provide potable water to its residents for years
  • Currently, 80% of households use water from hand-dug wells that are contaminated by latrines and agricultural runoff, and 20% use piped water
  • Each household that desires well water contracts with one of several private area drilling companies to construct their own raw water wells. Most household wells access the same shallow aquifer that is also the most likely to be contaminated by community pit latrines
  • The contamination of wells has been confirmed repeatedly through bacteriological testing of multiple samples throughout the community that were positive for excessive levels of fecal coliform bacteria
  • High rate of morbidity associated with water-borne pathogens and related illnesses

Desire

  • Clean water for the Santa Clara community: Population approx. 2,100, Total Households 400.
  • Current expressed community preference for piped water delivery to each individual household.
  • With the assistance of the local NGO (ANDAR), the community has already located a preferred; semi-remote well from which to extract the raw water for their system.

Organizations

  • Associacion de Desarrollo Comunitario (ADESCO), the Salvadoran National water NGO
  • Asociacion Nacional para la Defensa, Desarrollo y Distribucion del Agua a Nivel Rural (ANDAR)

System Selection

This community’s desire for piped water to each household is founded on their observations of piped water systems in neighboring communities and the presence of a few individual household water lines in Santa Clara that are connected to sources in neighboring communities.

Concerns with a tie-in to neighboring community

  • Communities are very spread out from one another
  • Water quality from the piped system is unreliable
  • Water capacity is insufficient to support the Santa Clara community.
  • Not economically feasible for households to pipe water from neighboring systems
  • Time investment in digging trenches
  • Costs associated with PVC for such long distances.

Benefits of a new system

  • Significantly less expensive
  • Community is in control of their own system's operation, maintenance, empowering and enabling the community to be responsible for their own provision of  services and well-being.