Engineers Without Borders

Project Meeting 10/20/08

October 22, 2008 at 5:17 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

10-20-08

Announcements:

• wiki up and running.

Email rob at robwhess@gmail.com to get onto it.

• Kaitlin (hughhekai@onid.orst.edu) will take over thank you notes and new PR position.

• $200 approved for La Cumbre water rights.

• TAC application turned in on Sunday

We’ve been assigned project manager. We will have an informal conference call with him soon, then a TAC conference call with volunteer engineers in a couple weeks.

• We will put out travel applications later this week or early next week.

• Potential travel dates are between Dec. 8-24

• We will send a few people early to make sure materials are ready.

Specialty or major doesn’t really matter when you work in El Salvador.

Design Update

• We are going with a square tank approximately 6m x 6m x 2m to store water for the dry season.
• Water from the roof with .5m lift. All water feeds into tank.
• First flush-gutters go to pipes that hold .03m of initial SA of roof.
• We will include an overflow line as well.
• Something will have to be built on each house for wet season.  3-4 55gal. drums to collect water from the roof is a likely design.
• We will also add the wash stations we didn’t finish list time

1. Health education-

• They talked to Aaron about needs of community.  He was able to give them lots of insight.
• They will talk about system maintenance, pollution, and littering as well as hygiene and disease prevention.
• Hopefully we will be able to bring microscopes to show them germs
• They plan on using visuals to teach.

• Banquet-will pass around detailed sign up sheets
• Starts at 6. Have kitchen at 3:30. 4 -5 to 9 on Thursday
• Will present project progress this Wednesday

Design

• Kelly will try to send TAC report out on the listserv.

It is not final, there’s plenty of room for change.

1. Various project details:

• 56m^3 tank volume planned.
• There probably will be a lot of rain at this location, well above the San Salvador average (~100in/yr).
• Tank roof will be about 7X6m
• We know how to make square tanks and don’t know how to do circular, so plan on sticking with square.
• 5.5m^3 of concrete will be required for a 6” thick foundation. It would be best to this pour all at once, but it might be too much for us.
• We could use a gas powered or electric mixer with 55 gal drums?
• Should we conduct a geotech survey? It would be a good idea, considering the size of tank, but we would probably need soil samples for a US firm to do it for us for nonprofit.  Scott will talk to an acquaintance about this.
• A tin roof is planned, but hopefully we can find a lower priced alternative.