A low-tech drilling method for refugee water supplies

Abstract

The Treguine refugee camp in Eastern Chad, is in a semiarid terrain of hard, crystalline rock, where hard-rock boreholes proved inadequate. Fortunately, a significant thickness of saturated sands and gravels in a nearby wadi provided a sufficient quantity of water, and tube wells were constructed using a vibro-bailing technique in a few hours. I n 2003 thousands of refugees fled across the border from Darfur to settle in refugee camps in the neighbouring Chad Republic. Treguine, a camp built in 2004, was designed to take more than 15,000 refugees from overcrowded nearby camps. A lowtechnology method has proved to be successful in obtaining sufficient water for more than 15,000 inhabitants in the Treguine refugee camp. The work was conducted for Oxfam in 2004.

Environmental health conditions in the transitional stage of forcible displacement: A systematic scoping review

“…Infrastructural obstacles included muddy water that required heavy chlorination (Malholland, 1985) and sewage/drainage problems (Tota-Maharaj, 2016). In Chad, there was little knowledge about the water table and sediment depth; as a result, developers could not be certain that the tubewells they constructed would be sustainable (Lytton et al, 2007). Short project duration was also reported as an obstacle to effective infrastructure interventions; in Lebanon, a sustainable waste collection system could not be developed because of the short timeframe of the project (UNICEF and Hydroconseil, 2017).…”

“…As a result, they could not maintain the WaSH services or the infrastructure without external support (UNICEF and Hydroconseil, 2017). In Chad, people were concerned about the construction of tubewells, since they worried that the water table would decrease and destroy their trees (Lytton et al, 2007).…”