UA Engineer Goes Back Country Biking in Tanzania to Test Local Water Sources
Engineering professor Linda Powers spent part of her summer biking around Tanzania testing wells for bacteria using a unique instrument designed at UA.
Watched by curious local children, Aminata Kilungu (kneeling), a PhD student in the UA soil, water and environmental science department, and Linda Powers, of the UA electrical and computer engineering department, use a portable instrument designed by Powers to test water taken from the Kilombero River in Ifakara, Tanzania. (Photo: Kurt Paterson)
Fifty miles of dust and ruts separate Ifakara from the nearest paved road -- a distance more comfortably crossed by foot than rattling four-wheel-drive, if it weren't for the malarial mosquitoes. Tracks alongside this "road" bring a train to town twice weekly.
There are few sanitary facilities and no municipal water system in this remote Tanzanian town. Ifakara and the surrounding region get water from open wells, the Kilombero River, and more than 100 deeper wells.
Most of the open wells are hand-dug, shallow, and prone to contamination, while the drilled wells, which are capped and topped by hand pumps, can provide pathogen-free water. Despite their humble appearance, these hand pumps -- and the wells below them -- can be critical to public health.
Water-borne diseases, such as diarrhea and cholera, contribute to a life expectancy of 53 for men and 58 for women in this East African country and to the deaths of more than one in ten children before age five.
Clean water is vital to improving public health, but the deeper, capped wells can be part of the solution only if they remain clean and haven't developed bacterial contamination in their pipes, or aren't pumping from underground sources that have become contaminated.
MSABI, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that drilled many of the wells, wants to determine which ones are polluted so they can be fixed or shut down. To do this, MSABI teamed with a group from Michigan Technological University to sample the wells. MTU researchers, in turn, asked a University of Arizona professor and PhD student to apply their special expertise and high-tech instrumentation to the problem.