Breaking Ground in Las Vegas, Santa Barbara

We are very excited to announce the beginning of construction of the newest AguaClara plant in Honduras. Located in Las Vegas, Santa Barbara, the country's 13th AguaClara plant in its 12th community represents a large step and unique challenge for AguaClara and Agua Para el Pueblo. Las Vegas has two water sources, one much dirtier than the other. The high turbidity water will be treated by flocculation and sedimentation before mixing with lower turbidity raw water and entering the filters. The capacity of the flocculation and sedimentation processes is 44 Liters per second, and the filters will be able to treat 70 Liters per second, treating not only the flocculated and settled water, but also the low turbidity raw water from the community's second water source. In all, the plant will supply clean water to a future population of over 30,000 people. This will be by far the largest capacity AguaClara plant to date!

Las Vegas also represents a unique challenge as the first community to use an AguaClara plant to address water hardness and scaling in the city's water pipes. Currently, the water's high pH, high calcium and magnesium levels, and increasing temperature throughout the distribution system cause calcium carbonate to build up in the drinking water pipes, obstructing the flow of water. Frequently replacing these pipes throughout town is a large expense for the municipal government as well as a regular complaint for the entire town. Alongside the normal dosing of coagulant and chlorine, hydrochloric acid will be dosed in the plant to combat the scaling issue.

German Castejon, pictured here with APP Civil Engineer Aminta Nunez, is the foreman on the construction site. German has worked on many projects with APP in the past, and this will be his fifth AguaClara plant as a foreman. Construction of the plant should last nine months and is planned to finish in November of this year.

Call for Applications - AguaClara Engineer in Honduras

Now accepting applications for AguaClara Engineers with Agua Para el Pueblo in Honduras to begin in Summer 2016! To learn more, please click on the link below. The application form will be open until 11:59 PM EST on Feb. 29, 2016.

Open Application Form

First Month of Operation in San Matías, El Paraíso

Operation of AguaClara's twelfth water treatment plant in Honduras began in the last week of September, 2015. The plant treats 14 L/s and serves about 700 households spread across four communities in the department of El Paraíso: San Matías, Robledal, Corral Falso, and San Francisco. Six operator candidates have been operating the plant for the past few weeks under the supervision of an AguaClara technician and engineer from Agua Para el Pueblo. They will be supervised for two months as a practical training period, after which the local water board will select three of them to be permanent operators.

The San Matías plant includes a number of innovations. The most visibly obvious is an elevated entrance tank which stores a reserve of water used to increase the flow through the plant when the operator needs to backwash the filter during the dry season. The reserve has already been tested successfully several times, and backwash frequency has been estimated at 30 hours. However, this value was estimated during a period of high influent turbidity, and will be less frequent during periods of low influent turbidity and as operators refine their coagulant dosing.

Another innovation hidden in the sand bend of the stacked rapid sand filter is a new injection system. Instead of the expensive, imported, easily-clogged slotted pipes used as previous entrance module branches, the new branches have orifices and wings which were fabricated locally by plant operators. The orifices cannot be clogged, and the wings prevent sand reentry during a brief period of back-flow at the end of the backwash cycle. Researchers at Cornell are working on a similar extraction system to eliminate the use of slotted pipes in the filter altogether.

The communities served by the plant have shown a strong commitment to its success, adopting a household monthly water tariff of 100 lempiras (about $5) - the highest water tariff of any community served by an AguaClara plant to date. Roughly half of this tariff will cover the expenses of the plant (operator salaries and chemicals), while the other half will cover general maintenance expenses for the network and plumber and accountant salaries. Considering that families often spend 200 lempiras a month on bottled water, our plant is going to provide a lot of savings!

Groundbreaking in San Matías, El Paraíso

Construction has begun on AguaClara’s 11th water treatment plant in Honduras! The new plant will treat 14 L/s and serve about 3,500 people in four communities: San Matías, Robledal, Corral Falso, and San Francisco. The project is being financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (COSUDE) and the community, and will include the construction of the plant as well as training and capacity-building with future plant operators and local water administrators. COSUDE has helped finance several other AguaClara plants in the past, including those in Alauca, San Nicolás, Morocelí, and Jesús de Otoro. We are implementing the project with our long-time partner Agua Para el Pueblo.

Click here to see pictures of our work so far!

The community is very excited about the project, as we saw when the students visited San Matías in January. We received our warmest welcoming ceremony yet, complete with a press briefing at the plant site, a town assembly with speeches, awards, music, and dancing, and a dinner banquet with more music and dancing. Community awareness and involvement are critical to the success and sustainability of our projects, so it’s really encouraging to see such an enthusiastic response from the people and leaders of San Matías.

This plant will be the first AguaClara plant to include an entrance tank reservoir, designed to assist in backwashing the filter if the flow into the plant drops during the dry months of summer. Elevated walls on a portion of the entrance tank will store water during normal operation, so that if the flow rate into the plant decreases significantly the operator can release this reserve to increase the flow through the plant up to what’s necessary to backwash the filter.

We've been developing the project since last November, and we officially broke ground a month ago on March 9, 2015. We expect to finish construction of the plant in August, followed by two months of practical, hands-on training for the new operators. That means we’re just five months away from providing clean drinking water to the people of San Matías!