Clean water from capped spring
Suzia is the name of the spring at the base of the big satellite antenna up on IPOK hill, past the main houses. This is the original spring that was capped in the early 1960s to serve IPOK. Dave Swanson of Bethlehem Covenant and Marv Bjorlin of Excelsior Covenant came out in Feb-March 1984 to redo the water system. They had raised money to ship a container of pipe and misc supplies. I worked a lot on redoing the capping of the spring back then.
For the current project, Frank is the World Vision (WV) technician working on the project. He is from Goma. He knows his stuff very well.
Frank talking with assistants
They are building a new cistern which will hold 40 m3 or about 11,000 gallons! The walls were poured early last week. This week they will start forming to pour the top.
New cistern in progress
The cistern will serve as a reservoir to give adequate pressure to the distribution system when there is a lot of demand downhill. This cistern is located above the top group of houses where school directors live. From the cistern, the water will go downhill to distribution points at this top group of houses, the group of teacher’s houses, downhill towards the CEUM church and all the way down to the health center near the bridge of the Mombonga river.
Suzia water source from 3 main springs
Three main springs were capped at the top. Frank estimates that they will receive 31 gal per minute!
Additional water source for the Suzia project
The photo directly above is of a 4th small spring in the area that has also been capped. This spring is about 40 ft downstream from the other springs. In this photo you can see that the pipe into the capped spring has yet to be installed. When it is installed the water will flow through it to a junction box joining all of these springs together. Another spring about 150ft farther downstream will also be capped and combined with the others. The total from all 5 of these springs will provide the 31 gpm that Frank estimates.
In this photo also notice the fine sand that has accumulated outside the spring cap. Sand continually flows out of these springs. Frank explained that he will build a settling tank farther downstream to allow this to settle out before the water flow 1-1/2 miles downhill to the cistern.
