Image 1. Proposed site
We are happy to announce that AguaClara Reach will be working with the Central Water and Sewage Authority (CWSA) of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Agua Para el Pueblo (APP) to provide safe water to the community of Georgetown in St. Vincent by treating the Perseverance water source. CWSA will implement an AguaClara water treatment plant to serve this community, which currently has a population of 5,000 people.
The Perseverance source water has had periods of unusually high turbidity in the past year. The slow-sand filtration plant that is currently treating the water is not able to adequately treat the water during high turbidity events. The constraints in getting safe water to these community members include a lack of electricity at the proposed plant site, source water that is not capable of being treated sufficiently by slow-sand filtration, and the potential for climate change to include more extreme rainfall events that will increase the turbidity of source water.
This project provides an opportunity for CWSA, ACR, and APP to work collaboratively to bring safe water to this community. When CWSA learned about the AguaClara technology, they decided to investigate further and visited several AguaClara plants in Honduras. Therefore, they were able to identify AguaClara technology as a match for the existing constraints.
An AguaClara water treatment plant is capable of treating the turbidities seen recently, would not use electricity to operate (which is useful since there is no power at the site proposed for Perseverance), will have a small footprint, and is made with minimal moving parts that are also mostly generic. Although CWSA has not implemented the AguaClara technology before, ACR and APP are prepared to provide technical support and training for the implementation of this technology. This will build CWSA capacity to facilitate the potential construction of additional AguaClara facilities in the future.
Image 2. Design in progress
We are currently in the preliminary engineering phase of the project and are designing an AguaClara plant using AIDE (the AguaClara Infrastructure Design Engine). We are looking forward to learning and growing through our new partnership with CWSA and using AguaClara technology to bring safe water to this community in St. Vincent.