CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador, Nov 7 (IPS) – Neither the central government nor most of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities have the capacity to install sufficient wastewater treatment plants to prevent water from escaping directly into the environment.
As a result, most rivers are so polluted that only 12 percent of them have good quality water, and the pollution translates into gastrointestinal and other diseases among this Central American country’s 6.7 million residents.
But there are some towns and cities that are making efforts to keep the treatment plants they have set up running, with financial support from international institutions.
One of these municipalities is Chirilagua in eastern El Salvador, along the Pacific Ocean to the south, the only ocean that bathes the coast of this Central American isthmus country.
The municipality operates a wastewater treatment plant built nearby as part of a 40-unit housing project called La Española, which will house 40 families affected by Hurricane Mitch, which caused death and destruction in Central America in October 1998.
The project was largely financed with money from the government of the southern Spanish region of Andalusia.
“The benefit is for the environment and for the families living nearby, because the less polluted the environment is, the healthier the population is,” says Eduardo Ortega, responsible for the plant’s maintenance.
The treatment plant filters the sewage entering the station using various processes, including ponds filled with volcanic soil and gravel.
“The goal is to prevent the treated water from polluting the San Roman River,” said Edwin Guzman, head of the environmental unit of the municipality of Chirilagua.
Close to the municipality is Flores de Andalucía, another rural settlement that was also built with Spanish relief funds for Hurricane Mitch survivors and has its own sewage treatment plant.
With a larger capacity, this station also receives sewage from El Cuco, a fishing village three kilometers south on a beach that, due to population growth, has become a town with modest shops, hostels and restaurants that receive tourists attracted by its gray sand beaches and gentle waves.
In El Salvador, only 8.52 percent of wastewater receives some form of treatment, and much of the waste is dumped into various bodies of water, polluting ecosystems and harming people’s health. Now some communities and municipalities have managed to install treatment plants managed by local residents and improve their lives.
© Inter Press Service (2023) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service