[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with the leading experts and I'm really pleased today to welcome Paul Bauman. Paul is a senior engineer at BGC Canada but on the side then he does a lot of humanitarian work, and that's going to be the topic of our podcast today. Mostly work in Sub-Saharan Africa, where he applies his skills as a geophysicist and a hydrogeologist to find groundwater in remote areas in many countries. So Paul, maybe you can give us a bit of background on how you got involved in this area from your early studies.
[00:01:00] Paul Bauman: Sure. Thanks Bridget. And it's great to be here for the interview and the podcast. I started my education in Princeton, New Jersey, a geological engineering degree, which was focused on groundwater. And then, after I got out of university, I graduated in 1981. Give you an idea of my age. I, guess my main motivation for job as a scientist was something, a little bit of excitement and get overseas. And the next five years I spent in Papua New Guinea in Indonesia, doing oil and gas exploration and I went back to grad school at the University of Waterloo, where I was able to combine my interest in geophysics and and groundwater. But I think it was that experience of living in Southeast Asia and remote locations, often working amongst very rural areas, very impoverished areas that kind of set the pace for me to continually pursue rural water development in less privileged parts of the world. So since 1990 I've been running a near surface geophysics group of about 20 geophysicists with all of our focus being on the near surface. So water exploration, contaminant mapping, archeology, tunnel detection. But, we've always continued to do rural water supply work, sometimes paid, usually not, but all parts of the world. Then, and I guess since maybe 2014 in particular, much of that focus has been in Africa and in East Africa in particular.
[00:02:36] Bridget Scanlon: You know, it's interesting that this year the United Nations has focused on groundwater and the mantra is making the invisible visible. And I think using geophysics, which you have applied in many areas, truly is an approach to making the invisible visible. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your work in the refugee camps early on from 2014 and Kakuma in Kenya, and how that began.
[00:03:05] Paul Bauman: Sure. Yeah. So, so even through the nineties, I'd done a lot of water supply and I guess I'd say remote parts of the world. For instance, I've done many projects in Yemen and Central America and after the tsunami, post tsunami reconstruction. But I'd never really been to a refugee camp until 2014, where, where I was asked to teach a course in introduction to groundwater, geophysics water exploration, and water quality in the Kakuma refugee camp in, in northwest in Kenya. It's I think then it was the third largest refugee camp in the world today. I believe it's the largest camp in the world at about 270,000 persons. Then, I wasn't there, you know, to make improve the water situation or to explore for water, or because the camp our refugee camps, essentially in the world, it was run by UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
And I just assumed everything was under control and people had what they needed and everything was fine. I was there to teach. And the main goal, overall goal of teaching refugees. In a camp was actually to create livelihood. So for instance, if they were returning being repatriated to a third party country, they would have a potential livelihood to fall back on through being repatriated to their own country. But even within the camp, people in these camps live on rations that are, that are very meager, are often less than 1500 calories a day, sometimes less than 1200 of those. Calories of those food supplies, they often sell many of them for phone cards, for fuel for cooking. So often, often even less so.
So one of the few jobs refugees can do in a camp is work in the water and sanitation sector (WASH) by teaching this course that allowed these refugees to work in that sector get some extra money that could help support them and their families. But anyways, while I was there, I certainly got an up close look at the water situation in this particular camp, the Kakuma camp and what I saw were very clearly once I got to experience camp life itself was at first there wasn't nearly enough water and the water quality was not good, so put a little more detail to that. Typically, UNHCR and most organizations have a target of 20 liters per person per day in a camp. And if you think of the average North American, we use well over 300 liters per day. So 20 liters per person per day for cleaning, washing, cooking, drinking in the middle of the desert in the heat of the day without air conditioning. Without dwelling on what we would consider adequate is not sufficient. And the fact is really, can they even meet these targets of 20 leaders per day? During the time I was in the camp, the typical targets, they were able to reach between 12 and 18 liters per day. I've been to other camps where the yield per person per day is about as low as six liters per day. So barely survival.
And then in terms of water quality, once I was able to look at some of the actual water analysis at the camp, it was very clear to me that fluoride was a ubiquitous problem in this camp, not surprising because of where the camp is located in the East Africa RIft Valley.
Of course, fluoride is, is commonly associated with Rift Valley environments, alkaline granites, fluoride, dissolving minerals and and so forth. And fluoride's a problem elsewhere in the world. It's not just in this camp, but what makes it unusual in a camp, of course, are not unusual, particularly they nefarious in a camp, is that you don't have a choice of other water sources.
You're drinking water and that's it. And the fluoride the concentration of course, is important, but what's more important is the actual total consumption. In an arid environment, of course, you're drinking more water and if you're not drinking water, perhaps the only other fluid you might be drinking is tea, which further concentrates fluoride versus us, we have filtered water. We have Coca-Cola, we have orange juice. We, we have a number of different sources of consumption every day. And here in Canada and most of the world, I think except for the United States, really most of the world fluoride guidelines, regulate fluoride to one and a half milligrams per liter. In the states, I believe it's four mg/L. Yeah. And above one and a half from one, once you start to get above three, you start to get into the realm of dental fluorosis, so once you approach 6, 7, 8 milligrams per liter, you start to get into the realm of skeletal fluorosis. So in this particular camp from the 12 wells that was supplying the camp while I was there, every well had fluoride concentrations at way above WHO and Canadian guidelines of one and a half milligrams per liter. And dental fluorosis was obvious. You could just simply look at people's teeth and you could see, brown, brown discoloration, for instance.
[00:08:34] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And so then you taught for a couple of years, 2014 and 15, and then you had an opportunity then to try to help develop groundwater resources, or you were working with some people on some of the existing wells and then you thought you could contribute to improve the situation. So those 12 wells were mostly in the volcanics and so they were getting fluoride from the volcanics. And so then maybe you can describe how you got started, using geophysical tools then to try to identify different types of geology that would avoid some of that fluoride.
[00:09:10] Paul Bauman: Yeah, that's right, so I taught this short course in 2014 and again in 2015 in the camp. And, again, initially, I wasn't there to, I hadn't even considered doing a water exploration water supply program. But through the course of being in the camp, and particularly there was one event, there was a massive flood that damaged some of the wells, some of the waterlines that impacted some of the wells, and I happened to be a hydrologist in this camp.
And the UNHCR called up from Nairobi and asked if I could do some well sampling and some well monitoring. And it was through that that I got a chance to see up close the situation with the flow rates that I recorded with the water chemistry. And I realized again, not enough water and the water quality was not good.
And I thought, well, I can do better. And I knew what they had been doing because in the process of teaching my course, I'd reviewed with my class every single water exploration report that had ever been done in the history of the camp, and I got to see what the main methods were, which were two methods that I would never use.
One is, in that type of environment, one is one d resistivity, which is probably the most widely used geophysical technique in Africa. Almost certainly the most widely used technique, and in some areas it does work quite well, but like any one D geophysical technique, one D assumes that the only changes in geology are in the vertical.
That is all the geology is laterally, laterally, continuous, like a layer cake, a birthday cake, geology, and some places in the world, in some places in Africa, that is true, but not in the Rift Valley. You have, you have massive normal faulting. You have great faults. You could have Pre-Cambrian igneous rock juxtaposed next to sedimentary rock, next to recent volcanic sandstone siltstone shields.
You have everything. And then on top of that, the actual salinities can vary dramatically because you can have very fresh water, for instance, that is recharged in shallow sands and gravels. Or you can have very brackish to even briny waters from deposits that were churned up in flash floods and then entered into aquifers.
So the geology is enormously complex, not at all suitable for one D methods, and that's the good method they use. Typically, and this isn't speculation, this is straight out of many of the water reports. I really wanna, should say all the water reports I read one d would often be used because it is required by, Kenyan guidelines, but ultimately, wells would be cited using water diviners. water witching, which, can boil down to a little bit of black magic. But really in practice, boils down to the experience of the people siting the well. So sometimes can be good, sometimes not so good. But nevertheless, I felt I could do better with, modern techniques and a different approach.
And secondly, I thought I could do better by targeting different aquifers. So of the 12 wells that were supplying the camp in, in 2000 or 2016 when we carried out our program, all of those wells without exception, were drawing from either entirely the volcanics or partially from the volcanics.
And we know that fluoride has added source from weathered volcanics. The flows of the well, some were pretty good, some were were variable, but I was also hoping that it could improve on the quantity as as well. So in 2016, after being there in 2014, 2015, I got a, a grant from Geoscientists Without Borders, and I, typically I wouldn't say what the value is, but I'm gonna say it now because, in retrospect, it was such a microscopic amount of money to accomplish what we did.
It was $50,000. And so for $50,000 in 2016, five of my colleagues and a mountain of geophysical equipment, we came to the Kakuma Refugee camp. And we organized two crews from the refugees that had been training in 2014 and and 15. And we used some of that cash to pay them to the maximum amount that we could allowable UNHCR stipend.
And we mounted an exploration program. We used two methods, seismic refraction and 2D resistivity. And our goal here was not to look for what everyone else had been looking for. These weathered volcanics. Our goal is to look for a different type of aquifer. shallow alluvial channels. We knew the camp.
I mean, if you've been to the camp, you know the camp is constructed between two large, what they call lagos, kind of ephemeral riverbeds. So wadis and Arabic arroyos. If you're in the US southwest, and we know these as lagos, they periodically flash flood and they'll flow for several days. And when they flood, we also knew that they would recharge. Well, we knew they recharged the volcanic because, the UNHCR did have some water level monitoring systems in their 12 water wells. So we figured if the volcanics get recharged and certainly the thick sands and gravels will also recharge if we could find them.
So we designed an exploration program to hunt out deep sand and gravel paleochannels connected to these large lagos. And how do we do that? Well, seismic refraction of course, simply measures, gives you a cross-section of the geology of the subsurface, and pretty much wherever you are in the world, overburden materials, unconsolidated materials, have a slow velocity whereas rock is fast. So, so that's easy. Mapping out the top of rock. And if we know the top of rock that is a depth to the depth to basement, then we can very quickly map out where the thickest sand and gravel channels are, or, or at least the thickest overburden. We don't know where the sand and gravel is and then we use 2D resistivity over these channels to determine if they're conductive and if they're conductive, they're either saline or clay or saline clays.
Or if they're resistive, which would mean they're sands and gravels and water saturated sands and gravels. And so, so that was the idea. Find the channels with seismic refraction and then determine whether those channels were saline and clay filled or freshwater and sand, sand and gravel filled. So based on that program, which we did in January, 2016,UNHCR followed with three wells.
And those wells were three of the most productive wells ever drilled in the history of the camp. Each and every one, each of those wells were the only wells ever drilled in the history of the camp that had fluoride concentrations below Kenyan and WHO guidelines. I think they're 1.8, 1.9, and 0.6 milligrams per liter.
I'm extraordinarily pleased, maybe relieved is a more accurate statement on extraordinary relief that when I was back in Kakuma in March of this year. So that's 7 years later. And all those wells are, not only are they still producing, but those are the main wells that are supplying the Kalobeyei expansion camp and more than half the Kakuma camps.
So yeah, very successful. And it's, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but to some degree, I guess, bit of hyper, I could say in a couple weeks, and that's all our program was a couple weeks, we did more to developing, expanding the understanding of groundwater and water supply in that camp that had been done for years and years. And certainly a big part of that was simply, well bringing a fresh look at things, but also using modern geophysical techniques, not state of the art. I mean, these are now standard techniques, seismic refraction and 2D resistivity. These should be used all the time, not just exceptional circumstances.
[00:17:51] Bridget Scanlon: I think that's amazing, Paul, what you guys accomplished on such a shoestring budget. but you also have a big equipment business with a lot of geophysical equipment. But the logistics of taking that over there and and making that happen, I just cannot imagine. But I think what I admire also greatly about your work is that you involved the local people.
You had trained them, in schools, with the, the short courses that you provided in 14 and 15. And then, they were able to use those skills and apply them in the field. That's fantastic. Capacity development, and so then they can go forward then and continue to do that. So if I recall correctly, you were able to map two paleo channels and were they anywhere located next to what the current channels are, where the current channels are, or, were the paleo channels in the subsurface, located away from those current channels?
[00:18:47] Paul Bauman: Yeah, so in the, in the Kakuma camp that, that's right, we were able to map paleo channels connected to the largest lagos. And in retrospect and especially in reference to the current chart, I, think that was quite fortuitous in that, as I said up front, you need an aquifer of course, but a shallow aquifer is only as good as how much water you pump out of it and how sustainable is that, is how much water is recharged. And we knew these aquifers are are recharged. And we knew in particular that aquifers tied to Lagos Tarara were recharged frequently because it's such a large lagos. And in Kenya, in the Turkana area, you get two rainy seasons. What they call the short rains in the fall and the long rains in the springs, and there's usually a week or two of of rain. They're not like monsoons. But what's happened is not like monsoon as you might have in other parts of Africa or India, let's say, but what's happened in the UN in an unprecedented fashion since 2019 these rains haven't come. There've been five successive, failed, failed rainy season, and this whole idea of recharge can start to fall to pieces, especially in such shallow aquifers.
But fortunately, because these particular channels were Lagos Tarara is unusual in that its watershed actually reaches into Uganda, which has received rains and Lagos Tarara in fact has flooded a few times over the past few years. And in fact is flooding right now.
So that did work out. And it's worth noting because, you could say to some degree, we lucked out and, but I guess on more broadly speaking, of course, the solution that works in one area isn't gonna work everywhere and mapping paleochannels in Turkana West and the area of Kakuma might not be a successful approach in, for instance of, of Turkana.
And so sure, the geology is important, any area you work, whether it's anywhere in the world, of course, probably the first thing you one should always do is step back and look at the broader geological context. And, in this case, targeting these paleochannels was a good approach because the entire camp, it's almost like an island set between two large lagos. So, but another part of the world, another approach might work., might be the way to go.
[00:21:35] Bridget Scanlon: And were you there when all the the wells were drilled? How many wells were drilled in total, at that, camp. And were they funded by UNHCR or, I know you had some minor funding to get going, but then did the community drill the remaining wells or were you involved in all of those initial wells?
[00:21:56] Paul Bauman: Yeah, in Turkana. In Kakuma, we were there in January. And then AIA in cooperation with, University of New Chat, they provided some geological expertise. I believe in April and May, they drilled what became known as boreholes 13, 14, and 15. And since then, other wells have been drilled.
I think they're at well, 19 at this point. And I think some of those were drilled by the World Food Program and FAO, food and Agricultural Organization, which are are subsets of, of the United Nations and again, it's, , this was part of my my education going to one of these camps we hear about refugee camps all over the world, but the reality is for the most part, with very few exceptions, all of these camps are under the UN auspices, the UN and essentially UNHCR United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees. Some have shared control with, say, UNICEF for Intl. Organization of Migration (IOM), which are also, UN organizations. But essentially the UN is responsible for these refugees, so they're responsible for food, education, security protection and water. Of course, water and sanitation. Right.
[00:23:19] Bridget Scanlon: And, so that was a huge success. And then you mentioned previously that, some of these refugees come to the Canada and the US and, you were able to look at some of the health impacts of the high fluoride, with studies in Canada and you did, publish some papers on that. That's right. Is that correct?
[00:23:36] Paul Bauman: That’s right, yeah. I'm, back a little bit. I'm probably one of the few geophysicists that has a, a paper co-authored in the Lancet. And after one of our programs, I think it was after my teaching stint in 2015, I came back to Calgary and the doctor at the Calgary Refugee Clinic, Dr. Anna Coakley asked me to meet someone. So I went to a coffee shop downtown and there was a refugee who had come to Calgary. His name was Muhammad. And he was introduced to me as a man that was 45 years old and he had the skeletal structure of a 90 year old person. He could barely stand up on his own. He was on crutches. He was in a great deal of pain, very stiff. And they, they had suspected the refugee clinic had suspected that he had fluorosis, but, they did what is the typical test? The urine test and his fluoride level, they were, they were typical of anybody that lives in a city that, that is fluoridated, that is drinking fluoridated water.
But that was already a bit of a tip off because at that point Calgary had the city council had voted to stop fluoridating, so that, that didn't quite make sense. But nevertheless, his fluoride levels from his urine were much less than someone that was suffering from fluorosis. As I recall, the clinic had contacted the CDC, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and they had responded that in fact they had looked at fluorosis in, in many refugees, many of the Kakuma refugees.
They come to the States and anyone who's seen the movie, what is the Hollywood movie would know a little bit about that. That they had tested them for fluorosis and none of them had it. And probably they tested them for fFluorosis, not because so much, they came from Kakuma, but they were coming from East Africa, Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea areas that are known to have in the Rift Valley that are known to have high fluoride. But anyway, when I, when I met this refugee, Mohamed, I, kind of skipped the small talk and I asked him two questions right away.
What part of the camp did you live in?
And he'd lived in the camp for six years and,
How long had he been in the camp which was, which was six years and he had lived in section of Kakuma 2, the camps divided until 1, 2, 3, 4, and then into zones and blocks.
And I knew from immediately from the reticulation maps, from the water system that he had been drinking from, well, five and only, well five, which is the well that had and has for many years had the highest fluoride concentrations, sometimes approaching 10 milligrams political. So in my mind, there was no doubt that he had had fluorosis, nonetheless not having any medical background, but, but the, Calgary, Alberta Health and the refugee clinic, they essentially, believe me, and they went on to do a battery of tests. They literally spent a million dollars on this one patient doing all kinds of tracer tests and bone biopsies and 3D imaging of a skeleton and so forth. And in particular, what was diagnostic was the bone biopsy that showed beyond any doubt that he was suffering from severe skeletal fluorosis.
So, of course this is, it's good for him because he the diagnosis and then can move on for there. But it's good for all refugees because it identifies that it is something to be looked at. It is something to be targeted. it identifies that the practices until that that time, were inadequate for screening for fluorosis.
And I, and I tell you what I, what I have heard from doctors that previous to this, this diagnostic diagnosis of fluorosis, that very often refugees would come complaining of skeletal pains, complaining of back pains. And they do the urine test. They don't have fluorosis, and their concerns would be dismissed.
Oh, you're a refugee. You're suffering from traumatic stress. You're suffering from PTSD, from that civil war in Sudan, or that famine and Somalia, political violence. And they would say, no, my back hurts. And they would not be believed and so this is, this has given doctors, essentially all across the world, certainly in North America, better tools to diagnose fluorosis and better understanding of the prevalence of fluorosis in, well certainly in the refugee community from Kakuma, but I'd say more broadly, refugees from East Africa.
[00:28:27] Bridget Scanlon: Right, and, so you worked in Kakuma early on, and when you went back recently, I got the impression that you were working with the communities around the refugee camp, because sometimes I've heard from NGOs that the communities around these refugee camps have worse situations in terms of water and food than actually the refugee camps.
So did you do work for the Turkana community when you visited recently? Or, were you trying to develop water resources for the pastoralists or the groups there. Yeah.
[00:28:57] Paul Bauman: That, 's absolutely a definite perception from the kind of perspective. It's definitely a reality in many aspects that people in the, the refugee camps have a, I don't wanna say a better life, but, but to some degree, an easier life than what they call in humanitarian speak, the host community and this case the host community are the, are the Turkaha people, which I'm sure for most people, they have no idea who the Turkana, you can kind of think of as these sort of, colorful Masai like Tribes people, but living a nomadic, semi, pastoral life in a desert environment versus the Savannah. So these are the people that have lived for millennia in northern Kenya and these desert environments, herding goats, donkeys, cattle and, camels, through Turkana and then often ranging very far into Uganda, into South Sudan, into Ethiopia, basically following the grass.
And last few years has been particularly hard. It's been hard on the refugees. It's, they're, living on a limited amount of water, very limited food rations. And then all the problems of just being a refugee in a foreign country. But it's just this difficult for the Turkana people
They aren't having water trucked to them. They don't have education, they don't have similar education services provided to them. That UN is obligated right In the camp. They don't have the medical services that the UN provides in the camp and so forth. And they benefit very little from the camp being on essentially their tribal land.
So partly there's compensation for this. many of the NGOs do try to provide some services to the Turkana people. So for instance, in that training course that I was putting on, about 30 to 40% of the students were Turkana people. And in fact they were able to benefit dramatically from this because some of the Turkana people working with the Water and Sanitation company, and and it was great what they're able to get a lot of very practical knowledge that they were able to apply for their jobs, but for the more traditional host communities, that are largely illiterate, that are pastoralists that are, their lives revolve around taking their flocks from one watering source to another. They aren't benefiting from the camp and they're suffering beyond words from, from this. I mean, the things you see people walking 10 kilometers or more with a filthy 20 liter Jerri can digging down into a hole and taking what they would call water, what we would call mud, and then taking it back to their home. It's, heartbreaking. So this most recent program that was sponsored by similar sponsor and support as the previous programs I did with the small Israeli NGO called Isra Aid, as well as, UMCR, the United Methodist Council of Relief.
This particular program was targeting water sources for the host community, for the Turkana, hamlets, say within 15 to 20 kilometers of the refugee camp.
[00:32:30] Bridget Scanlon: And, were you successful? Was it a similar situation? Were you able to identify paleo channels or was it the regulars on top of the volcanic or yeah.
[00:32:37] Paul Bauman: That a great, a great question and I, I was almost hoping you wouldn't ask it, but, of course that's the obvious question that the answer, the truthful answer is we, we don't know. I mean, we were targeting anything that might be a good aquifer.
So yes, we were targeting paleochannels, we were targeting faults, and we did have some great success mapping, some spectacular faults. It hasn't been drilled yet, but we think we have a great target there. the sandstone units. There's, There's fractured rock units.
There's a variety of different units that we we're targeting. We just completed the reporting. by Kenyan Law, a drilling tender can't go out until there's been a report. So we finished the work in early March. We just completed the report. The report's going out. Now we've cited two wells. We're hoping they'll be positive, but, but we really don't know.
And, I'll say to some degree, I'm, usually I have a pretty good idea. pretty much wherever we go in the world. But we're really suffering from a significant degree of uncertainty here. largely for two reasons. The geology is just simply so complex. As, as I said, you have, every lithology you can imagine from you could be standing and beneath you beneath a flood plain.
There could be preCambrian granites. There could be cretaceous sandstone that could be volcanics. And then you have all kinds of faulting. And then, and then you could, and then even when you do find water, could be anything from brine to meteoric water. That's one problem. And then then the other problem, which is which, of course we only, we can blame nature on the first problem, but we only have ourselves to blame on the second problem.
This is just really no background information of, of any value. There's no decent geological maps, there's no water well database. I was out in some areas with one of the Turkana experts from the water authority who supposedly knows more about the geology of the area than anyone. And we were standing in a plane, a basin between two small mountain ranges.
And I, I asked, and I showed him our geo geophysical sections and we, we knew we were on top of rock because we had very fast seismic trees, but we had no idea whether we were on volcanic, sandstone or crystal in basement. I asked him to speculate. Give me your wildest guess, and he couldn't, there's just no information and I say that's our fault because there should be information. Many dry holes have have been drilled. many, many, and many NGOs have worked there, government has worked there. Church or organizations, freelancers from all over the world have come to save the world and bring Oregon and stuck holes in the, in the ground here and there.
And yet you can't get any information. When I say. Any, not, not, I never saw a single lithology log. And so, people, it's difficult to, without any types of ground truthing, it's difficult to make confident interpretations. And, certainly, and, and it's often difficult even just to repeat, not to repeat mistakes that, that have already been done.
So, again, we use 2D resistivity in size, refraction, good, good techniques for pretty much surefire mapping of paleo channels. But some of these hamlets were far away from any of the large lagos. So, so we're looking for bedrock, aquifers. Seismic's a great technique for finding faults and resistivity can be pretty good if you have significant offsets.
So we, we have that resistivity is great for ruling out some targets. So for instance, if the resistivity is a really low, it could be say line, you don't wanna just drill, that could be shale. You don't wanna drill that, but, but, you hit this sweet spot of resist disabilities of, 50 to a hundred oh meters.
It could be an amazing sandstone aquifer or it could be a terribly weathered volcanic aquifer that with all the fractures plugged up with clays and you really just don't know to until you drill, drill a hole. So again, we have a couple targets and they'll be drilling those in the next month or so.
And we're hoping they'll, obviously, we're, we're hoping they'll be successful. And if they're not successful, we're certainly hoping that. The information, as embarrassed as I will be, we're hoping the information, we know the information will go public. We're hoping it'll be included in government database that is being constructed now.
And if it's success Yeah, go ahead. Yeah,
[00:37:26] Bridget Scanlon: I wonder I mean you mentioned there's a lot of NGOs and all sorts of groups out there drilling and doing all of this stuff, but some of them don't have geologists to help with that sort of thing. And then there are a lot of when they drill dry holes, I mean, that's great information also, but we never publicize our mistakes, or they call them test holes or something.
So, and then they don't report them or, or things like that. So we would really benefit from more information. And it seems like some groups, they use colonial maps, that were developed in the forties and fifties, and have to rely on that. It seemed like there was a lot more geology done back then than there is now, but you have all these boreholes and you have them PVC cased. So you could just do downhole geophysics in many of these and get a lot more information if there was, an opportunity to do that. Yeah, that, yeah.
[00:38:20] Paul Bauman: You said a few things there, Bridget, that are very, very important. and you're right, different organizations will come and they'll want, they'll get budgets to drill, very expensive test holes, but a dry hole is, is certainly as good of or better than a test hole. any geophysical program, of course. What do we do in geophysics? We try to identify some physical property that will distinguish an aquifer, the aquifer, what we're looking for from everything else.
The host rock, the host material, freshwater from saltwater sandstones, from weathered volcanics, and so forth. And all over Africa it's astounding all over Africa. most water wells a PVC case, so you can run induction logs for electrical conductivity, electrical resistivity.
You can run natural gamma logs to identify to distinguish clays from from shield and magnetic susceptibility logs to get a sense of how useful, magnetic exploration would be. And that's something, I, being a geophysicist, I like see, like looking at physical properties, it's like other people would, it's like another sense. It's like you have sight and sound and taste. Geophysicists. We have resistivity and magnetic susceptibility and radioactivity. These are, these are our, our senses. And and it's how I try to begin, I like to begin any exploration program. We, we did a, a massive water exploration program in Malawi in 1999, 2000, 2001.
And the first thing we did was we pulled a lot of the pumps out and we pulled, we, we identified about 20 wells that weren't functioning and they had long history of production. but the, well, the, the pumps themselves weren't functioning, so we pulled the pumps out.
And while the pumps were out on the ground and being fixed, we did borehole gamma, resistivity, magnetic susceptibility, logging, and we were able to identify what were the physical properties that make a good aquifer, what are the physical properties that produce a dry hole? And that's how we designed that program.
And that's what I've tried to do since we just did something very similar immediately preceding this Kakuma program in Northwest Kenya, we did a three week water exploration program in Northern Uganda. And there we did exactly that. We divided into two crews. One crew repaired wells and they pulled the pumps out, they repaired the pumps. And while those pumps were out of the hole, we do surface geophysics, 2D resistivity, geophysics on resistivity and magnetic susceptibility. We do hydraulic testing. We do isotope sampling. We do water chemistry sampling. We run a borehole camera. Something almost everyone forget, says that, when you have a hole in the a borehole, all you really know is you have a borehole there. You don't know where it's screened you don't know what the depth is. You don't even know if that driller really did put a screen there. So, so we always, run a borehole camera as well and really try to pull as much science out of the well as we can. And then we use that information to inform our exploration program.
And, I can tell you in the, I don't know, 40 or so holes we've drilled in Uganda, we have not had a dry hole and And we think part, a big part of that is, a huge part of that is, is, is doing all the, all the science that we do on these repair holes. And most, most NGOs, they would, they would just laugh at this.
They would say, this is an aid project, this is our humanitarian project. it's not a, it's not a research project, but in fact that, that science is, is really what allows the real confident exploration to go forward and, the great thing too is after we've done all this science at these repair he holes, we put the well back and we put the pump back in the hole and that, and that village has a working, well, usually, usually installed better than the, the previous wells.
So it's a, it's a win-win win situation. Well, I think
[00:42:43] Bridget Scanlon: That's, incredible. I mean, I, I did a little bit of geophysics way back early in my career when I was working on radioactive waste disposal in West Texas and Jeff Payne was trying to teach me some geophysics. But I mean, if you are walking along and you're trying to figure out where, we were trying to find places where there was no water movement for radioactive waste disposal, but having an, an electromagnetic instrument that you could walk along with you was like a set of eyes and then you could do downhole, borehole stuff to try to figure out what was controlling what you were seeing. You know? So I, I think it's, it's amazing. And I think with the United Nations program this year, making the invisible visible, maybe we can promote more and more geophysics. And, then if NGOs and other groups get more comfortable with it, they can realize the value of it.
Because, I mean, you read a lot of reports, maybe one in six wells are successful, or, five or out of six might be dry holes. And so really we have to improve that success rate.
[00:43:45] Paul Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. I, I absolutely Bridget and certainly I can tell you I've been to what they called, I, I guess what they call, cluster meetings. II've been to many of these in crisis situations. For instance, in Bangladesh, after the Rohingya ethnic cleansing and in after the, 2004 tsunami and so forth. And these cluster meetings, all the NGOs and UN workers and international aid agencies, they all gather from their various sectors.
So, for instance, a WASH, cluster water and sanitation and hygiene. you'll have, whatever, 50, 60 people working in that sector in, in a room. And yeah, I, it's a fundamental problem in the humanitarian sector. I mean, not only do people working in WASH need to learn about geophysics, but, but very often, and really the truth is most of the time they, they simply do not have a strong professional background in hydrogeology in general. most of the time they come from a logistic background or a public health background. Very rarely you'll actually have a hydrogeologist making hydrogeological decisions and almost never will you have a, pretty much, never will you have a geophysicist in the room saying, you should do some borehole geophysics.
You should, you're in, you're in Bangladesh, you're, that you're, you're on the Teknaf peninsula, you're drilling, there's, there's ocean, within 500 meters of the ocean on, on each side. You should do some surveys to map the salt water intrusion front, and no one's even asking those questions.
So, yeah, there's a whole level of the, humanitarian sector needs a major facelift in terms of its, of even asking and then addressing the, the important professional questions to deal with the subsurface. How, having said that, as I think you and I know something that's caught the interest of, of a, of people all over the world and a lot of our work is, we're working, I mean, I'm working less and less with NGOs, less and less with professional humanitarians, let's say.
And more and more with the people in the villages, with the people that are depending on the wells that are actually drilling the wells that are trying to make their livelihoods, supplying their own livelihoods and, and their own villages. And certainly what I've found over the last many years to working in places like Kakuma, but especially in small villages, is, yeah, maybe you need a degree in geophysics. To understand everything about everything, but, but you don't need a degree in geophysics to do geophysical surveys. No more than you need to be a master mechanic to drive a car. And so, so we've been putting a lot of energy into people in these areas where we've been working in Zambia, in Northern Uganda and even in Kenya, somewhat.
Train them on how to do their own surveys, how to interpret their surveys, and then how to actually follow up on their data, not just have some plots and data and, and wait for some NGO to magically appear from the sky and put a water well in, but to drill their own wells, to install their own pumps, to maintain their own own pumps.
And everything I've seen is it can be done and in general it can be done a lot better than the humanitarian sector has shown that they can do it and absolutely, no question. They can do it a lot cheaper. But, we just finished our second well in Uganda, and I say we, I'm sitting here in my basement and the Ugandan villages we've been working with, they finished the well, and the cost of that well was 2100 dollars for drilling, casing, hand pump, silver works. So yeah,
[00:47:53] Bridget Scanlon: I think, that's amazing. And your description of them drilling, hand drilling the wells, it may take them a week or two or whatever to drill some of these wells. But it seemed like they're using technology that they're comfortable with and then it seemed like they would feel like they could drill the next well and the next well, and they wouldn't be relying on outside groups then. And so they become more self-sufficient. So the drilling and also I think, I was impressed with your attention to detail with the cement apron and to prevent any contamination of the wellhead and, keep water away from it. All of those details are so important and then the capacity development, the training of the local people, then it seemed like they're more likely to keep, maintain these wells and keep them functioning. So I think all of those aspects feed into resilient water systems for these groups.
[00:48:48] Paul Bauman: Yeah, that, that, that's right, Bridget. I, and again, a lot of NGOs would laugh at us like we're going to drill. So in this last program in, in just three weeks, in less than three weeks in the field in Uganda, we paired wells in 11 villages, restoring water supplies to about 6,000 people. did all this science and then we sited 11 wells and those wells are being drilled now. It takes about 2 weeks to drill a well. And when I say drill a well, that's drill the well, install the casing, install the pump, and then build a fence around the area, plant the garden, and do the works.
And again, a lot of NGOs would laugh at us. They would say, look, we could do all that in a month with a mechanical rig. But to some degree, I'd say that they're missing the point. First of all, there’s no sacrifice in quality. these, these wells we are putting in, it's the same hand pumps they would, use for a mechanical rig. We have an annular region that a gravel pack. We put a bentonite plug. We do water sampling. We still do water chemistry. It takes longer and there's advantages to taking longer. We get better cuttings. I think we more properly cite the screens we use.
We use a crew of about 18, 16 to 18 to drill these wells. We're using, we're using, in these wells, we're using what's called the Baptist methods. Where, where you, you basically show up at the site. You cut three d three trees down, or one, one long tree. You make a tripod, you rig a block, you have the the drill.
You have the drill stem. And, a bit with a foot valve and then a percussion bit. Usually we start with a one and a half to three inch bit, and then you can pound your way down through weathered crystal and rock. You can get down 20, 25 meters in, in a few days, couple days, and then you remount to four inches as you remount to six inches. And you end up with the same thing as a mechanical rig. But you've used the village. You've employed the village, the village. you need water for mud. The village hauls water. because you don't have water. That's why you're, you're, they're drilling the, the, the wells, so they're hauling water from the stream or, or a spring.
So they're very, providing the muscle power of lifting that stem, dropping out, lifting it, dropping at thousands of times a day. so they're very involved. They're very engaged with it. They see every detailed step of the well construction. They're working with our Ugandan trainees to, they get to know them. Our Ugandan trainees are living in the village during that time. They're being fed. They're being housed. And when and if there's a problem down the road with the well, the villages, they'll better understand what the problem is. They'll know what the problem is. They'll better take care of the well, they'll better maintain the well, and they'll, without any question, they'll have this ownership of, of the, well that, that simply is, is not there when an NGO or, or some other, a church organization, some humanitarian organization, comes in with their mechanical rig, they pull down in a few hours. a few engineers from the big city, from Kampala or Gulu build the well, and they walk the way, they walk away. There's, there's no ownership. There's no understanding of maintenance. And and that's certainly one of the main reason why wherever you go, not just in Uganda, wherever you go in Africa, you see, I would estimate one out of three wells is simply not, not functioning, and there's no, there's no re reason for that. They, they should be functioning. People in the villages should be able to maintain their own water systems.
[00:52:37] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And I think that was similar to the results from the British Geological Survey studies, so that you know about a third of the wells are not functioning.
And I think the approach that you use then, with the techniques that people are comfortable with, the communities are comfortable with, and then in the process then they learn about the geology and the functioning of the well and everything. So I think it's time wells. And then to have a large group and then, then have the other people that they can call on later if they have issues.
So I really appreciate your, taking the time today. I'm a huge fan of your work, Paul. Our guest today is Paul Bowman from Calgary, who has been doing humanitarian work in many regions globally. But what we've discussed today was mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He provides the geophysical equipment and then he does the work pro bono, and he organizes all of this. I just, cannot imagine. I just feel maybe you just don't sleep, Paul. That's all I can surmise, but I really appreciate what you do and I hope that we will get other groups to incorporate your techniques more and help expand this program.
[00:52:37] Paul Bauman: Yeah. Thanks so much, Bridget. It's so, it's, it's so much fun talking about these programs and partly because they're so interesting and they're so important, but I can tell you also because they're, just so much fun. I mean, it's great working in Africa. It's fantastic working in these villages and it's, it's so fantastic working, creating your kind of own mini organization where, where you're working directly with the people and eating their food and speaking their language, and seeing how they live and really seeing firsthand the benefits of, of all this education and efforts. It's, it's very, it's very satisfying and, it's a good time. I recommend it to anybody.
[00:54:33] Bridget Scanlon: Well, thank you so much. we'll talk to you later.
[00:54:35] Paul Bauman: Thank you, Bridget. Bye. Bye.
