Students help bring water to Afghan village

Residents of a war-torn Afghan village will have better access to water, thanks to the efforts of MESA students at Solano Community College.

A dozen students are designing a self-sustaining water pump that will bring water to residents of Lalander, a village about 15 kilometers from the capitol of Kabul.

The pump will be a precious resource in Lalander’s recovery. Once a lush agricultural community, the village has been leveled since the Soviet-Afghanistan war in the 1980s. It now is home to some 800 families, with more war refugees arriving every month.

“Lalander was one of the hardest hit cities in Afghanistan,” said Mostafa Ghous, MESA director at Solano Community College, whose family fled the country in 1980. “It’s near the entrance to the capitol so it was in the path of the fighting and was heavily destroyed. Kabul got help to rebuild, but Lalander didn’t.”

The reminders of war are all around the village, including ghostly frames of former buildings, a complete lack of electricity, and undetonated landmines that residents must avoid while walking to the river, Lalander’s only source of water.

When students first decided to take on the pump project, they had to conduct extensive research. Students studied the geography and weather of Lalander and Afghanistan. They used Google Earth to identify the Lalander terrain. Then they examined a variety of pump designs.

“We thought about waterwheels,” explained math major Kimberly Smith. “But they weren’t very stable. The pump would have to withstand freezing weather and earthquakes.” The pump also had to be inexpensive and made from parts easily obtained from Kabul.

Students finally decided on a hydraulic ram pump design that uses a combination of water flow and compressed air. Explained biology major Luis Godoy, “The water flows into a pipe. A valve closes and forces the water up. Air pressure compresses the water and forces it to flow up another pipe.”

With the help of Ghous and MESA Coordinator Robert Payawal, students have built a number of prototypes that they are testing in a creek on a faculty member’s property in Napa. During one weekend foray, a prototype built by Godoy successfully activated the cutoff valve, but didn’t produce enough pressure to pump the water up.

“Not enough water flow,” mused electrical engineering major Sterling de Mille. “Maybe we need to look at the use of multiple pumps with smaller diameters, to feed into one delivery pipe.”

MESA is working with Trust in Education, a non-profit humanitarian organization, which will take the finalized pump blueprints to Afghanistan and help the villagers build the device.

This project demonstrates an important side of engineering, said Ghous, who is Afghan.

“It brings awareness to the humanity side of engineering, in a world with all this destruction. It presents the social responsibility side of science and engineering,” he said.

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