by Justus and Thijs
Last weekend we had a two day trip to Inhaca, a beautiful island in Maputo Bay. We had time to rest, to snorkel and to enjoy the weather. It is bizarre that you can swim in schools of fish without scaring them away. Also the nature there was absolutely beautiful.
In the beginning of the trip we saw the shore of Maputo and we saw part of the sewer system discharge directly into the bay. The sea turns more blue the further you go from Maputo.
Sewer system with direct discharge to the bay.
Back in Maputo we started to work again. We had appointments with CRA, AdeM, the Dutch embassy and several others. The main goal for the coming weeks for us will be the volume analysis of the sewers. We want to know how much is in the system, how much is being discharged into the bay and how much enters the wastewater treatment plant. For this we hope to visit the pumping stations. These will be an important aspect of our research. If we can see how much they pump, we can estimate volumes.
Since we do not have this information yet we used a different approach. With the freshwater consumption numbers, we estimated the amount of water which should be in the system. Of course this is a very rough estimation, but it shows us what kind of numbers we can expect. We will continue with this to get a more precise estimation.
At the same time Lena is assessing the collection practices in the peri-urban areas to contribute to the flow analyses. For her and for us the data collection is going well. We hope that we will soon be able to draw conclusions.
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Justus and Thijs
