PZ Series Pump for Humanitarian Water Rehabilitation Project in Haiti

According to the Human Development Index, 80 percent of Haiti’s 9 million residents live below the poverty line. On top of that, the country has been besieged by an unprecedented string of natural disasters, from the four hurricanes that ravaged its shores in 2008 to the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left 1 million of its residents homeless in 2010.

The plight of Haiti has drawn the attention of organizations like Roots of Development, a non-profit concern based in Washington D.C. whose self-professed mission is to help the impoverished communities of Haiti obtain the resources they need to sustainably manage their own development. One of Roots of Development’s Haiti success stories is a Water Rehabilitation Project in the community of Gran Sous, which is located on the Haitian island of La Gonave, approximately 50 miles from the mainland capital of Port-au-Prince.

The Gran Sous Water Rehabilitation Project was conceived as a way to supply fresh water to the people of the community, who had been getting all of their water from a spring that contained high levels of various contaminants, including fecal coliform, nitrates and nitrites. Working with a local planning board, the project was designed to redirect a portion of the spring’s water to a series of newly constructed cisterns where it is treated and made fit for human consumption, clothes washing and bathing.

The spring water is purified through the introduction of a sodium-hypochlorite solution as it is gathered in the cisterns, but early attempts to regulate the proper amount of sodium hypochlorite that is used were unsuccessful. The solution, after 18 months of trial and error with other technologies, turned out to be a PZ Series electronic diaphragm metering pump from Neptune, which injects precise amounts of the sodium-hypochlorite solution into the water during the purification process. The PZ pump is ideal for the Gran Sous project because its “pulse” metering operates on any single-phase voltage from 94 VAC to 264 VAC, while it is also easy to operate and maintains a steady flow rate, which can be manually adjusted.

“We had been looking for a solution for a year-and-a-half and the Neptune device has been perfect,” said Chad Bissonnette, Executive Director of Roots of Development, who brought the PZ pump to the project this summer. “It was very easy to install, very easy to use for the man who is in charge of monitoring the project; it’s doing exactly what we needed it to do, which is inject the chemical solution at the same rate that the water flows into the tank. It has produced a lot of confidence in the community members responsible for managing the facility and treating the water.”