Round two - halfway through

Sunday 17th March

Its a public holiday today (one of the 24 they'll have this year!) - to commemorate the birthday of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 'Bangabandhu' ('Friend of Bengal').  He is seen as the father of the nation, and his eldest daughter is the current prime minister.  More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Mujibur_Rahman.

Suman has been a trooper and gone down to site today to collect another round of samples (so we can track pathogen decay after 5 days and 10 days) en-route to another project site.  The driver returned to Dhaka with them, and I've just put them in the bath!

 I was going to unpack them and put them in the fridge, but the ice is still pretty thick, so I'll let them melt quietly overnight and drain off any excess water in the morning, before we take them to the icddr,b.

I sketched up a little sampling plan for Practical Action last time I was there, and this gives a pretty good idea of the current site layout (numbers correspond to sampling points):

Computerised version of sampling plan sketch

Apparently, the open bed is the most liquid of the three (open/ roof+vented/ roof+closed at night) and the middle bed, which is open at both ends, is almost dry! It's only been 5days, and they each have 900L of sludge on them, compared to 500L in the previous Phase!  This is Good News.

They are all still dripping a bit at the gate valve, showing water is still draining out of them, and apparently some was also coming out from the end of the reedbed, so the 13th sample was taken too (I suspect this is because the reeds are still very young and the bed is still maturing).

They have been raking every day before 9am, when the temperatures in the bed are closest to outside temperatures (to minimise heat loss when the roofs are removed), and perhaps in the next (and final phase) we will try non-raked versus raked to assess how much impact it has.

We are now trying a 'baking' approach and closing the end of the bed that was being closed just at night, but now keeping it closed 24/7 to assess the temperature gain from having a sealed drying bed.

We've got hartals ('closed doors') tomorrow, Tuesday and Thursday.  They are basically national strikes, making it hard to get out and about, and it's inadvisable to go out after dark in case anything (riot-y) kicks off.  This means I'm making a bid for Faridpur on Wednesday so I can get there again before I leave on Friday!  I'll keep you posted on whether I make it back before the city shuts down!