Drinking lake water

The last time I have seen lake Victoria (many moons ago) it was rather clean. The first option would be for everyone to prevent things from getting into the lake. sanitation should be moved to further away from the shores of the lake.

Filtration and a scoop of household bleach in the water will kill most of the bad ones.

Bleach can also be manufactured on a household basis,

It is a basic human right to receive clean safe water for domestic use. It would be best for you to contact your health department.

I like your response, I have one question concerning the mentioned pathogens. Are any of the mentioned resistant to chlorine such a giardia cysts could be?

thanks rustyh2o

Unfortunately, giardia & cryptosporidium cysts are highly resistant to normal levels of chlorination. The most effective ways to get rid of them are ozonation or ultrafiltration.

Re malaria and quinine, one wonders if they have access to Chloroquine and/or Primaquine. The last numbers I saw said that 2,400,000,000 people in at least 100 countries were affected with malaria.

Isn't that more than a third of the world population?

Sparkstation--#2 said in summary:

"If the people in your area wish to remain healthy, it is going to need to be a full community = Team effort" This is a wise statement.

So Unite the 350. And wait a few days if somebody sent you plans for an easy,fast and economic solution.

Meanwhile you can post the answers to follwing Q's:

1. Your location Longditude,Latitude,Elevation a.m.s.level
2. How high is your average village above Lake level(assuming steady all year)
3. How spread out is your 350 from a lakeside central point where you will have treatment facility-- I mean how far is the farthest house group.
4. What is village economy--are you typing the post from your home or an Internet Cafe' or from far away?
5. Do you have line Electric power -- 5KW -Say
6. 350+Cattle?+Chicken-all need healthy water--how many each?
7. How much $$ are you prepared to spend on Capital creating safe water 350 x100litres/day?
8. How much are people prepared to pay per litre of clean/safe water ready to drink without further treating/heating?

I concur with all the other posts. Nice job Sparky!

Filtration is one thing you need to do to remove the floating sediment.

Boiling the water prior to consumption is the other thing to do.

Adding a small amount of chlorine would be okay, but boiling is pretty much accepted as the de-facto means of making water safe to drink.

"According to the Wilderness Medical Society, water temperatures above 160° F (70° C) kill all pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185° F (85° C) within a few minutes. So in the time it takes for the water to reach the boiling point (212° F or 100° C) from 160° F (70° C), all pathogens will be killed, even at high altitude."

Getting water to a rolling boil will probably be good enough.

Anonymous Hero To add a bit of emphasis to your post:

First SEDIMENTATION, then FILTERING IF POSSIBLE, and the universally accepted method of BOILING WILL DESTROY ALL ORGANISMS AND SOME CHEMICAL AGENTS.

The above are readily implemented in almost any enviornment whereas chlorine bleach or materials for other methods may be difficult to procure.

You have lots of choices.

UV light is being used instead of chemicals and boiling to sterilize water for drinking. Filtering and sterilizing the water will not remove all harmful contaminates that have been dumped it to the lake. I would have the water tested from the area you wish to draw it from. And additional spots along the lake on both sides. The test will tell you what you will need to treat the water for. I would all so look at some type of monitoring of the water at the intake for contaminates that can not be filtered or sterilize. And a reservoir to hold a couple days treated water in case of problems with the system.

Boil whatever you drink or cook with.

And dispose of bio-waste far from the lake. Also keep track of where you draw water. Find the safe and unsafe/sick and unsick places to draw. Mark the unsafe--both for not drawing and for not swimming. If you bathe in lake, don't get your water in same area.

Yes boiling can be effective but there are many islands in lake victioria where the fuel supply may already be strained from just cooking.

Hi Guest,

Note this link on water filtration:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_filter

filters work to remove bacteria, protozoa and microbial cysts and other things.

S

http://www.potpaz.org/pfpfilters.htm

http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/sas/naturalresources/index.jsp

My understanding is that the traditional way of rendering suspect water drinkable for thousands of years was to use it to make beer. Am I mistaken?

That was a fine post Venturer. I agree completly!

You need a water treatment plant. you will get filtered, disinfected, soft drinking water. 350 people represent approximately 80 to 100 households and is not a great number, and it can be done very easily and relatively cheap. But must be done professionally.

www.odis.co.il

Wangito.

There are 2 things that cause diseases from drinking water: pathogens and chemical contaminants. You need to identify what agents are involved before you can take effective action. While chlorination will kill most pathogens, it doesn't work well on others e.g. viruses, and may actually react adversely if chemical contaminants are the cause of the problem.

Here is some information concerning the lake water I received from Joseph who has asked for help with water treatment.

snip:The water - borne diseases experienced on the Island include :
-Typhoid, amoebic dysentry and cholera.
For an individual household about 30 L. of drinking water is required per a day.We have 4 Dispensaries and 24 schools on the Island brother.We have 24 Villages with the highest having around 100 households and the lowest around 45 households.
Thanks servant of God but remember we have fishing Beaches which may tatal to around 17 which also need alot of attention on water issue so, so much dear so i will give you their report soon.
Gooooood.
Joseph.

It is my understanding that the lake water is fairly clear except when they have big storms and the lake gets stirred up. Step number 1 could be, pour the water through a 5 micron bag filter to remove the larger particles. Step 2, pump the water through a 5 micron cartridge filter then an absolute 1 micron filter. Step 3 chlorinate with either sodium hypochlorite or calcium hypochlorite.

Comments?

Salutations!

Here in Canada we had a unfortunate event that had a town full of sick people from contaminated water. After all was said and done the system that was put in to prevent it from happening again was made by a Canadian firm called Trojan Technologies. They have a variety of sizes of systems ranging from a single tap under the sink system for the home or a portable one for RV owners up to systems suited for large cities processing millions of gallons per day.

http://www.trojanuv.com/en/homeframe.htm

I have heard of a system being distributed by UN relief agencies in which a solar panel powers a bank of UV(c) flourescent bulbs and the grossly filtered water flows through a glass pipe surrounded by the bulbs in order to sterilize it as opposed to chlorination which is ideal if sodium or calcium hypochlorate is avaliable.

Such a gross filtration could be accomplished with a diatomaceous earth or sand filter.

The only problem you will run into with this system is if pesticides or herbicides have contaminated the water. even boiling will not remove these. distillation or Reverse Osmosis might work. but reverse osmosis requires electricity and infrastructure to support it.

Distillation is possible if volumes are low. Be careful in using car radiators or something like that as condenser coils. Many are soldered using lead and the resulting lead contamination could be deadly. Also the antifreeze residue could be poisonous as well. There are many moonshiners that have gone blind using car radiators this way.

You are right Rorschach, the 'flourescent' bulb was probably one of the lamps made by Trojan. The UV light emmitted distroys all molocules larger than the H2o itself. Even the clorine molocules are broken down. Although it looks like a glass tube, it is actually quarts crystal specifally designed to let thru the wavelength that will distroy all molocules. All herbicides and pesticides are broken down as well, all that needs to be done is filter it.

Some links for UV sterilization:

http://compoundsemiconductor.net/cws/article/news/19464

San Martin UV water treatment plant built with the help of the Rotary Club:

http://www.frankdevlyn.org/commcorps/ftp/Success%20Stories.PDF

Most of the "sanitation" additives sold in stores for water purification use iodine instead of chlorine. If you have a druggist nearby, ask for a little iodine crystals. You can also use tincture of iodine. Take a bottle, anything up to 5-gallons, fill it with the water, add a few small crystals of iodine, and let it set overnight. You'll be surprised at the amount of solid precipitate you'll find in the morning!

Just recently I saw a program again about medical advancements and their great results in the last century. wonderful, but...

But, if you look at what economist write about the same subject (not in such a heroic language), it turns out, that in the last centuries, up to the 60s BY FAR the grates impact was public sanitation in the good old USA. The same is applicable to other places to the greatest degree. A snail cannot make its way to a well dug well. Malaria cannot be spread (this way at least) by a pumped well and covered water containers. Moskito netting with inbuilt poison for sleeping net is a very effective ticket. DDT (yeah, that stuff) spraying inside a thatch roof decimates moskitoes, etc.

These are all dependent on understanding and willingness, much less on money, PUBLIC SANITATION MEASURES. So, if it is not done, it is not done for reasons nothing to do with this simple knowledge whatsoever. The knowledge is there, lack of money is not really an issue. For the rest, plenty of bad actors to go around.

Iodine can be hard on pregnant and nursing mothers and their children so I am told.

On this particular Island wells were dug but the unique thing about this geography is a layer of salt water is hit before fresh water. This is a problem with small equipment as a casing needs to be put down to rock to seal the saltwater and drill deeper until fresh water is obtained. Not practical with small drilling equipment.

Filtration is fairly simple and chlorine generators can be made fairly inexpensively. I know this because i build them myself. Converting 1.25 pounds of table salt to sodium hypochlorite solution can chlorinate 25,000 gallons of water

Actually Rusty, it is not that difficult to isolate one aquifer from another when drilling a well, what you must do is make sure you cement the casing in the area of the salt water aquifer very well to prevent the salt water from contaminating the fresh water aquifer. it can be done. Oil wells pass through aquifers every day and they do not contaminate them. It just takes someone who knows what they are doing.

details are welcome, there are several unproductive boreholes on the island. they were bored with hand powered rotary drills. The problem is using hand powered equipment is that it will not drill through rock. Sink a casing into the layer of rock then where do you go with hand powered equipment. I am talking about water jet with hand turned boring equipment.

Rorschach, Yes I understand what you are saying. It would be nice if it were possible to get a bigger rig on the island. It would be a logistical nightmare I am afraid. There is plenty of lake water available. It just needs to be cleaned up. Filtration and chlorination will do the job. They are in the process of getting electricity on the Island using generators and a grid. This is good news to me since I can now put in place a sodium hypochlorite generation system that can easily provide a source of fresh chlorine cheaply for the whole island. That is why they call it Appropiate Technology. If it is workable and practical for an area then that would be the way to go.

Most water well rigs are truck mounted and powered from the truck's engine (I am in the oilfield side and our stuff tends to be a bit bigger). If a truck could be brought to the island on a barge, a well could be installed in under a week I'd expect. probably the trick is getting together the money to pay for it. I have worked on the design of land based oil rigs that break down into small enough pieces to be flown in using helicopters for really remote jungle work. But of course the payoff for an oil well makes those kinds of expendiatures worthwhile too. It is hard to find a profit motive behind a water well. The trick would of course be finding a derrick truck and a crew that knew what they were doing. I assume these islands are in the Ugandan sector of the lake. I understand that tourism is beginning to be a major industry in the region. Tourists generally demand safe drinking water, perhaps you can use that to your advantage.