Reach Beyond

(HCJB Global Healthcare)

Rural Local Potable Water Systems / Quito + Apuñag, Ecuador

The rural village of Apuñag is located in the southern Chimborazo province of Ecuador’s highland region. Here, at over 13,000 feet in elevation, some of Ecuador’s poorest indigenous peoples struggle to survive.

Working closely with HCJB Radio and HCJB Global Heathcare, Craig Miller provided engineering, land surveying, and construction assistance for the development of a new potable water system for the village of Apuñag, serving roughly 75 people. Mr. Miller also helped excavate the trenches to each village hut for the distribution system.

The incredible topography and extreme terrain of this part of the Andes Mountains makes life in this village very difficult. Prior to the advent of these very localized rural water system projects, the thousands of indigenous peoples forced economically to live in these areas had to walk 6-8 hours multiple times each week to retrieve potable water from mountain streams.

As part of the Community Development programme with HCJB Global Healthcare, small micro-reservoir tanks were constructed at various strategic locations. Water from the mountain streams was piped to each tank. The most challenging part of these simple systems was properly engineering the hydraulic head differential between the new storage tanks and the threshold elevation of each mud hut. The extreme topography of the Andes Mountains created huge vertical drops over short horizontal distances, making the water pressure in the distribution piping so great that it often became impossible to find pipe strong enough to contain these forces. This placed great value on the surveying and engineering aspects of the project and the proper location of each micro-storage reservoir. The health impacts of readily available potable water were substantial. Previously, the long distances encouraged many families to frequently compromise their health, consuming and using water that was grossly substandard.