Water for Waslala is a Villanova Service Trip which goes to Waslala, Nicaragua to provide engineering consulting services to a region which lacks water resources and has a poor quality of life.  Waslala is a city of about 40,000 people who live in the mountainous area of north-central Nicaragua, eight hours north of Managua, the capital.  The town center contains about 8,000 people with the remaining 32,000 being out in surrounding villages.  Our task down in Nicaragua was to survey the surrounding villages and provide consulting as to how to provide potable water to the surrounding villages.  Only about 68% of the people in Waslala have access to potable drinking water. 

            During spring break, we flew to Managua, Nicaragua and took a bus to Waslala.  Our major task in Waslala was to hike or horseback ride out to the surrounding villages, find water sources and take GPS coordinates in order to design a piping and tank system to provide the water from the source to the village.  We surveyed nine villages in the week which we were down there.  While we surveyed Waslala, we looked into design ideas for certain projects which could provide basic needs like electricity and sanitation for the people.

            The first task of the water project was to identify the water source.  The types of sources found in Waslala were groundwater, surface water, and springs.  When the source was found, the next step was to deliver the water.  To accomplish this, we surveyed the area and decided which type of intake manifold, pressure head and piping network was necessary to deliver to the village.  Once the water reached the village, a treatment process would be designed to counter possible disease or sickness.  The treatment process could include disinfection, filtration or sedimentation depending on the quality of the water from the source.  Our design team decided on filtration to separate fecal coli form bacteria, the main contaminant found in drinking water in the area, from the water.  Once the water was treated, it would be stored in a tank facility and distributed throughout the village.