Today I embarked on an 8 hour road trip from Chiang Mai back to Bangkok where I will be spending the remainder of my time. My Uncle Mong is doing the driving and has wonderfully taken off a lot of time from work to take me around Chiang Mai and Bangkok. I expressed interest prior to arriving in Thailand to visit the water filtration and sanitation center that he works at as a technician. We arrive in an area nearby Chiang Mai that consists of a cluster of 75 factories, many of them electronic firms or Japanese companies. My uncle brings me to the water filtration system which draws water from a local river source into a reservoir. He then tours me around to the rooms where chlorine and aluminum sulfate are pumped into the water source and brings me up a large set of stairs where the AlSO4 is stirred and filtered with the water in 3 huge vats. This chlorinated and chemically treated water is stored in a considerably sized water tower, not as large as ones found in mid-size cities but still a respectable size.
Next we drive to the waste treatment plant which is considerably larger. This part consists of 7 ponds. If you had not known they were waste ponds, it actually looked pretty and vast like a series of lakes and even had fish in it. Much like the waste management that I was briefly introduced to in a Lycoming College microbiology class, the waste is taken and filtered, aerated, introduced to microbes to breakdown human waste, and eventually when thoroughly cleaned, is introduced to a local water source.
As my uncle is showing me all of this, I think about Haiti. For the past several months, I’ve been engaged in various projects taking place near Port-au-Prince and one of them involving potable water and sanitation waste management. I have no doubt that this equipment is expensive and complex requiring lots of money and mechanical and other engineers, but it looks so feasible. Especially since this water treatment plant is only for the factories serving about 40,000 people. Imagine the good that a permanent water treatment and waste management facility could do in the earthquake devastated regions where many currently rely on cholera-ridden water from ground water sources, bleached water from NGOs, or expensive water packets. The management of human waste has been a growing issue which is perpetuated when inevitable torrential rainfalls cause flooding of the latrines and further perpetuates cholera and disease spread. With all the money that has been promised to various non-profits, amounting to billions, wouldn’t it make sense to build permanent structures such as these to drastically improve all areas of life from quality of living to increased health? Then I think about whose job is it to do this? Do non-profits team money together or the government make it an imperative to start. If this type of water and sanitation structure can be built for a slew of factories, it can and should also be built for Haitians in need.
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