Water Solutions

There was recently an email discussion between myself and a few others which started off as concentrating on water and sanitation, but soon expanded (read: degenerated) into a brainstorm about general planning ideas and solutions for logistical issues.  I will re-post some excerpts and add commentary.<?xml:namespace prefix =" o" ns =" "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"" />

Early in the conversation, Vinay Gupta said this: "one of the issues is granularity. The TIDES model favors house-level solutions, rather than village scale or town scale facilities. RO is nice because, you know, you haul in a few units, they spit out a thousand gallons a day each, and that's nice on the logistics-of- delivery end, but greatly limits options in the long term."

This eventually led to the idea that we could possibly use a military resource, requested through USAFRICOM for an expedient solution using ROWPUs and other milspec hardware.  Since they are easily set up and maintained using trained personnel, they would perform as a stopgap while more distributed resources are being.. well, distributed.

Also early in the conversation, Linton Wells mentioned, "One thing that we've found so far is that almost no solution (with the possible exception of high efficiency lighting) is applicable to every situation."

This is a very good point, which led part of the conversation in the direction of general planning issues.  How can we set up a system that is fleshed out enough to provide SOPs that can react quickly while retaining enough flexibility to provide a solution that can be applied expediently to a unique situation?  The idea came up of having a system of codes, kind of like the NATO climate codes.  This code would involve multiple variables which would be attached to existing resources.  I'm not sure how much work has already been done on this, as I haven't really done extensive reading of this site yet.  I'll be sure to do that and engage in any already existing discussions.

This doesn't even begin to cover what was discussed in the 50+ post email discussion.  With the permission of the participants, I'd like to re-post the discussion in-full, once I find out how to do so. :)

While there may already be a structure in place, there needs to be organization on all levels, from the Tactical (what exactly do we want to do?) to the Organizational (what resources do we have access to/use?) to the Tactical (HOW do we get it done?).  Since I'm very new here, I'll try to get caught up on whatever information is available.  In the meantime, I'll keep on posting my thoughts here.

--tc