March202010

=March 20, 2010 - Hike to Mountain Spring Water Source for Las Delicias= This was an arduous hike - 12 kilometers round trip in about 4 hours (including breaks and a while examining spring boxes). Five people from Las Delicias joined me including Fredi (president), Chilo (valvulero), Santiago, Jorge, and one other. The landscape is stunning with many ridges and valleys coming down from the mountain. In the beginning the hike went through villages and coffee plantations but later it was rugged lush forest/rainforest. The pipeline remained within a few feet of the ground for most of the path and had a couple of spans across small valleys or roads. There were many uphill and downhill sections of the pipeline with significant slopes - it was treacherous hiking at times.

I have uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr with a few captions to give you a feel for the actual pipeline and springboxes: []

My general impression is that there is not much opportunity to improve the amount of water obtained from this water source. I am glad to have seen it and was surprised that it was much different than I had imagined. The amount of pipe in this mountain is really impressive - there are at least seven communities that get water from the same stretch of valley and all have pipelines that snake their way up the mountain (often together for long distances). In the area where water is collected, there are a bunch of springboxes distributed in odd ways throughout the riverbed - at this time there was very little evidence of surface water but we could tell that water was flowing in most if not all of the gravity-fed pipelines. I believe that all of the springboxes are installed in a location where the river valley was rising steeply but then leveled out a bit for a little while (evidence of a perched aquifer where impermeable rocks come to surface and channel flow to surface?)

These water systems seem a good example of anarchy in action - I tried to ask if there were arguments about the system and some communities' systems interfering with others - and the impression i get is that it is all peaceful. For a few communities, this is their only source of water.

there was a rather long section of piping that was completely PVC for three pipelines that all shared the same supports (in this region all the other pipelines had gone off in other directions). Apparently all three galvanized pipes disappeared at the same time (in a storm or other natural event). Replacing with galvanized is expensive so most repairs are PVC or a band-aid style fix with some kind of cement, rubber, and wire. The biggest sources of leaks are falling rocks, falling trees, and people who cut holes in pipes to steal water. There were only a couple of spots on the las Delicias pipeline that show actively leaking water (and the leaks were slow).

Also, here is a link to other photos from Las Delicias: []