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They Simply Refused to Fail
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The second phase put the idea into practice.

This year's group spent their winter break testing the system. After connecting the chlorine, four filters and a network of PVC piping, they used water from the Durham wastewater treatment plant to mimic the potability of the water they would encounter in Cumayasa.


The plan was to supply water to about 300 students in the village high school. But when the team arrived in the Dominican Republic, they learned the water was going to also serve an elementary school of 900 students. "The increase in the number of students meant they would be using a lot more water per day than we had intended," Robertson says.

And it was more water than the system was engineered for. That meant having to revisit the design right there on the spot; no going back to Gregg Hall and the mock-up that had allowed them to extensively test the filters in a theoretical environment.

"We had to recalculate the dose of chlorine, and we had to rethink the life of the filters," Robertson says. "Using four times more water than we'd originally planned was going to mean replacing the filters more often than we'd thought."

They also needed a bigger tank. The water for the schools is stored in a large cistern. To fill it, someone from the school has to open a valve and then wait. It takes as many as two days for water to travel from La Romana. School officials never knew how many gallons of water they would get at one time.

As it turned out, what delayed installing the purification system wasn't the redesign—it was the Dominican Republic's Customs office. After three days of waiting for the parts that had been shipped from Durham to be released, the high school principal went to the airport and came back with the supplies. There was also the issue of power outages. But the students persevered.

"These students worked long and hard overcoming so many challenges to provide safe drinking water to 1,200 schoolchildren in this very, very poor community," says Malley. "They simply refused to fail. It was really inspiring." ~



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