Drawing from the well of knowledge

By Mary Manning

Friday, Nov. 28, 2003 | 2:16 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION Nov. 29 - 30, 2003

For 10 years scientists based at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas and Reno have reached people in three African countries, offering techniques developed in this desert state to find clean, plentiful drinking water.

The scientists participating in the West Africa Water Initiative for the past decade also train people in remote villages to test water wells and post their results on laptop computers in order to track water quality.

The problem of finding drinkable water in Africa is crucial. In 1998 more than 2 million people on the African continent died of water-related diseases.

An average African woman walks more than 3 1/2 miles each day for water, then carries a drum filled with it, weighing 44 pounds, on her head, project scientists discovered.

By using remote satellite sensing information and Landsat aerial photos, the DRI scientists discovered promising sites in Ghana to drill wells, the initiative's project manager Alan McKay said.

"Most places in Nevada are similar to those in Ghana," McKay said, explaining that ground water flows through faults and fractures in the rock in West Africa as it does in Nevada's Great Basin valleys.

Subtle features missed by people on the ground were clearly visible from the air, McKay said.

The DRI in the past had tracked from aerial photos how rainwater meanders through craters that collapsed after underground nuclear weapons experiments at the Nevada Test Site. "We used a lot of the same techniques from the Nevada Test Site applied to West Africa," he said.

One of the missing pieces in solving Africa's water woes is tracking plentiful rain that falls on the villages. Finding drinkable water is difficult. "Where is it going?" McKay said.

That question is being answered by hydrology researchers such as Michael Young, who works at DRI's Las Vegas center.

Scientists are dating the water by tracing naturally occurring "heavy oxygen" and deuterium, or "heavy water," a stable isotope of hydrogen, Young said.

"It could be that the groundwater recharges very rapidly," Young said of the African villages where rainwater disappears into the ground.

Researchers are also looking for tritium, a radioactive material that was produced when nuclear weapons exploded above ground. The first atomic bomb was triggered in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The United States, the former Soviet Union and China tested weapons above ground. Since tritium can be traced for up to 60 years, if any of it is found in Africa's ground water, that could mean the rainwater carrying the radioactive element flows very quickly through the ground.

"That gives us a very nice time line," Young said.

Young, an assistant research professor at DRI, recently returned from Ghana, where he introduced a computer database he created to allow project members to study 10 years of data collected and well-drilling trends in the area to identify the spots delivering potable water.

One mother recently told a Desert Research Institute scientist from Nevada that clean water is so scarce in the Republic of Ghana, she bathes her child by feeding him spicy foods in the evening and then wiping him down with his own perspiration as he sleeps.

Ghanaians in rural areas often hand dig wells or scoop surface water the color of chocolate milk.

The United Nations has reported that the state of drinkable water worldwide is in jeopardy. Within 50 years millions of people worldwide will face shortages brought on by drought, pollution and mismanagement of water resources, the United Nations said.

The West Africa Water Initiative, or WAWI, is a collaboration funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and implemented by World Vision-Ghana and the nonprofit Desert Research Institute. This initiative is one of seven programs sponsored by the Hilton Foundation, which has given $13 million in grants for water programs in isolated rural areas of West Africa, McKay said.

Besides finding enough water, contaminants in available water have to be measured.

"Water quality has emerged, front and center, in this project," McKay said.

Arsenic and fluoride can naturally occur. Arsenic has been detected in Fallon, a military and farming town 60 miles east of Reno, at 100 parts per million. Fallon officials are working with the federal Environmental Protection Agency to lower that level to 50 parts per million or lower and recent EPA studies are indicating 10 ppm or lower for safety.

From research in Bangladesh, it appears that drilling wells may contribute to higher levels of arsenic, Young said.

In one African village, Tiburi, an entire generation of children suffer from skeletal deformation from ingesting too much naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water, McKay said.

"These are truly tragic results," he said.

On the one hand, low, controlled concentrations of fluoride in public drinking water sources strengthens bones and teeth; in contrast, too much fluoride mottles teeth and weakens bones.

In the Washoe Lake and Washoe Valley region of Northern Nevada, McKay said, all of the residents drink bottled water because the fluoride levels are so high. When fluoride is added to public water supplies, scientists monitor the levels based on air and water temperatures and how much water the population drinks.

"But in Africa it is prohibitive to provide bottled water," McKay said, as it is too expensive for villagers to buy.

So World Vision, one of the sponsors of the water research, is capping wells in Africa that contain too much arsenic or fluoride.

A short-term solution requires tanker trucks to deliver potable water to villages, he said.

Over the next five years scientists plan to drill 450 new wells in Ghana, 200 wells in Mali and 175 wells in Niger, all countries that border one another in western Africa.

In the decade that the program has been operating, the success rate for drilling wells containing clean water has improved from 30 percent to 70 percent after DRI scientists began applying their techniques developed in Nevada.

The DRI arrived in Mali Oct. 1, the third west African nation it has entered. Testing wells, monitoring water and teaching villagers how to check their water are all under way.

Once a village has a well with clean water, keeping the resource clear falls on the residents.

There are 10 international agencies trying to share data gathered from thousands of wells already drilled in West Africa, McKay said.

So the scientists train the villagers how to collect and test well water and how to record the data into laptops. They even have computer manuals on hand to explain how to change a computer's battery.