LWW Team Tests Water
Systems in the Yucatan

by Bill Williams

Water science is not simple. Again and again, that truth soaked in as technicians of Living Waters for the World traveled around the mission’s water purification projects in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

Their testing equipment almost invariably found high concentrations of naturallyoccurring calcium and salt in water sources. That’s not dangerous, particularly, but it doesn’t help the taste any and it tends to clog up filtering systems.

The finding created a dilemma for LWW’s Technology Task Force. The mission’s elegantly simple combination of filtration, ozone treatment and chlorine addition makes water safe to drink, but it doesn’t take out calcium and salt. About the only way to do that involves some pretty high-tech processes like reverse osmosis, which would not only increase the cost of the system but make it harder to train operators in maintenance.

Joanie Lukens of Danville, KY, points out features of the water
system installed by Living Waters for the World at a school in
Ciudad del Carmen to Terry Newland, Synod Executive.

Systems in the northern Yucatan were examined by Bob Friley of Vicksburg, Miss., and George Hoge of Louisville, Ky., members of the Technical Task Force; Joanie Lukins of Danville, Ky., LWW’s coordinator for water projects in the Yucatan, and Bill Williams of Paris, Tenn., moderator of the LWW Committee.

Visited sites included the Josue (Joshua) Bible School and San Pedro Oprhanage in Ciudad del Carmen and the San Pablo seminary in Merida, as well as a number of sites at Presbyterian churches.

It was the first time for a technical team from LWW to make a quality-check circuit of existing systems. The data collected at treatment sites were augmented by scientific analyses of water samples contributed by the Science Department of Murray State University in Kentucky.