Sample Time

Tuesday 12th March

I should say that while we are in Faridpur this time, we have been staying at BRAC’s lovely guesthouse in the grounds of its regional training centre.  While we were there, 160 people were using its facilities, in various groups from government officials to villagers, receiving training on a wide variety of topics, I forget the detail but BRAC work across many many sectors, including WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene), environmental legislation, and womens’ empowerment.

 Lovely grounds at BRAC Training Centre

  

It’s been going 22 years, and still going strong.

Wonderful flower garden in front of the guest house – big pom-pom headed chrysanthemums, poppies, sunflowers, aloe vera, and many others I couldn’t name.

We went to site, the morning after [the sludge delivery] the night before, and all seems well.

Sludge in the open bed - we're monitoring the temperature just above it to compare with the ambient weather monitored from the weather station mounted on a bamboo stick 30ft in the air.

Here you can see the corkboard wedges tilting the roof slightly to allow rain/ condensate to run-off.

On one of the roofs, we are leaving the ends open 24/7, and the other, we are closing between 6pm and 9am to understand more about the effect of ventilation on the drying rate.

View of the beds with their new roofs on

We then began the raking and the sampling

Mmm raking sludge

Suman helping with the sampling

This is my brave face.  Note the bewildered local watching through the fence...! 

This one’s probably better - 'happily spooning sludge into a jar'

We had a bit of an issue with the first drying bed (the one nearest the entrance) because when we opened the gate valves, at first clear water came out, and then nothing...

Initial result – number 12 is from the bed in question, and made us suspicious

No flow from the third pipe was worrying

This suggested to us that some water had remained in the bed from when they were testing them (when they were newly built, and before the application of the sludge) and now there was some kind of blockage somewhere.  We poked rods and sticks into the gate valve, and even melted a hole into the connection pipe to the bed so we could measure levels in the pipe behind the valve, but couldn’t find anything conclusive.  Mamun (Practical Action) was sure the valve was working fine when they tested it, so we thought it might be the material on the filter blocking it.  We gave it a thorough raking over, and sure enough slightly mucky water started to drip through.

Suman had an ingenious way of getting the effluent samples from the valves – involving the use of plastic plates…

Plate underneath valve to catch flow

Plate folded and used to pour liquid into the sample jars.

One interesting observation was the build up of condensation on the underside of the roofs.  I couldn’t quite capture it, but it formed a kind of gradient from south to north, with the south end having almost no condensate, and the north end being very fogged.  Funnily enough this aligns with the prevailing wind direction, so perhaps our alignment was out so much after all! (we wanted them E-W orientated to catch maximum solar gain).

One we were done at site, we went back to the Practical Action office to pack the samples on ice for the night.  We'd take them to Dhaka in the morning.

Slabs of ice being delivered

then smashed up

and then packed around the samples