(The following article was contributed by George Strain.)
A team from University Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, LA recently installed a system in Havana, Cuba at the headquarters of the Consejo de Iglesias de Cuba (Cuba Council of Churches, CIC). One of the assets touted by their president was the presence of 24/7 guards on the security-fenced premises. After completing our installation and holding our water celebration, the team members and several Cuban ministers went out to dinner for further celebration, leaving at 7 pm. Upon return at about 10:30 some team members checked the installation, only to discover that someone had tried to either operate it, play with it, or who knows what? All valves were in the open position except for the untreated water inlet valve. The pump and ozone system were both on (a single switch controlled power to both, but the pump also required flipping a separate power switch.) Posters explaining the proper uses for clean water had been stood up in front of the system as if to cover the evidence. The pump had run dry, although it turned out to not be damaged. The ozonator had overheated because, in the absence of flowing water, there was no venturi effect to provide suction of the ozone into the water stream. The buildup of heat or ozone damaged all four tubes and melted some insulation from the small diameter pigtail wires from each tube. The bulbs gave off a yellowish light instead of the expected blue. Prozone engineers later suggested that this was probably only the light from the internal bulb and not some residual ozone production capacity. As far as we could tell there was no damage to the ballasts in the ozonator. Understandably, this proved to be a very disheartening end to our week in Havana.


We had included with our system components the LWW ozone spare parts kit, which it turns out only includes one spare tube – reasonable in light of the anticipated operational life of the tubes. We removed one of the four bad tubes and inserted the single spare tube, and became operational again. The downside is that with only one operational tube instead of four, the second pass of water treatment needs to be run four times as long to reach near equivalent ozone levels in the water in preparation for dispensing. This was not the optimal solution.
One of our team members had planned to stay an additional week, and was able to locate spare tubes at the two installations in Cardenas: two at El Fuerte and one at Juan G Hall. These churches graciously allowed us to borrow them. He installed these three, bringing the CIC installation up to the regulation four functioning tubes in the ozonator. The one with the newest manufacturing date gave off the strongest blue light; the other two that were manufactured earlier gave off a weaker light, but are assumed to be functional. Prozone engineers tell us that this is just an artifact of manufacturing when an external coating is placed on the tube. In the meantime, we were able to order four replacement tubes directly from Prozone at the LWW discounted rate ($90/tube) and will be sending them to Cuba in late October with another group.
We don’t know the identity of the culprit in this affair, but have our suspicions. The take-home message from our imbroglio is that none of us can be lax in making certain that the systems we install are truly safe and secure. Because the CIC location has already served as a demonstration model to representatives of all of the denominations that are members of CIC, we risked the reputation of the Living Waters for the World program in the community and throughout the country. The final outcome of our trip was one more clean water system in Cuba, but one that was a bit more expensive than anticipated. We encourage all in-country network teams to maintain a supply of at least four spare ozone tubes and two spare ozonator ballasts (@ $60) in order to quickly return systems to operational status in the event of any damage.
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