Sewage problems threaten health of Haiti hospital
by Bill Horan
HAITI – Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital is a 700 bed facility that treats around 3,300 patients a week. It’s a very busy place with an emergency room open 24/7 and where patients line up at the gate at 6 a.m. to wait for an 8 a.m. opening.
Every day about 400 patients show up and at least 30 babies are born there. It is, by far, the largest hospital in Haiti. Emergency and maternity patients are treated free, all others pay 60 cents for their initial visit and 25 cents for each follow up visit. As inexpensive as that seems, many Haitians still cannot afford it, but even the destitute are welcomed.
Today, at the request of the United Nations Office for the Special Envoy of Haiti, Nancy Dorsinville, Eric and I visited the hospital. The purpose of our visit was to assess the broken water system and begin developing a strategy to fix and improve it. During our arrival meeting with the hospital administrator, she asked that we also look at the sewage system, which she described as being “frequently plugged up and smelling very bad in the operating rooms.”
It turned out that the sewage system problem was a much more serious health threat than the broken water system, and has become the focus of our immediate attention.
The hospital complex, built on the landward side of the busy ocean frontage street, is composed of at least a dozen concrete buildings sprawling over a large, walled campus. The grounds are neat with bougainvilleas blooming in massive clusters among palm trees that line sun-baked campus streets.
The sewage and waste water from each of the two or three story buildings is pumped through underground pipes to a central “lagoon,” where it is (supposed to be) treated with chlorine, filtered, and then discharged into a pipe that carries it under the frontage road to the sea. The maintenance chief told us that when the treatment plant was functioning, that the discharge was “clean enough to wash your hands in it.”
But…the system, and all of its filters and pumps, has been broken since 2004. As a result, raw sewage is gravity discharged into the pipe to the sea. Even worse, there is often blockage from un-macerated solid waste, causing all of the toilets and drains in the entire hospital complex to back up and bubble over.
Can you even imagine the stench of waste from over 1,000 patients, as well as hundreds of staff, in a stifling hot place, without flush toilets and drains that work?
Operation Blessing will be tackling these issues with the the Port-au-Prince General Hospital as well as providing water assessment for all 10 General Hospitals throughout the country.
To be continued…
Entries (RSS)
December 20th, 2009 at 12:44 am
I commend you for tackling such a huge sewage problem.
What are you going to do to address it? Won’t it be best to replace the sewer lines with new PVC, & add some kind of treatment plant?
Brenda in NM
January 10th, 2010 at 3:53 am
Haiti has been battered with one catastrophe after another: economic, political, and environmental. As if things could not get worse, the US recession has resulted in a scarcity of philanthropic funding, forcing many education and health programs to close their doors.
I have read that only a portion of the island has access to sewage system, so fresh water is largely contaminated and is a primary source of disease in Haiti. And because of overuse and environmental degradation , Haitian soils are almost completely infertile.
You are doing a great job!