Why Tibas, Moravia Water May Taste Odd
by Rod Hughes
If you are one of the 60,000 people living in Tibas and Moravia, you may have noticed that your drinking water tastes like s–t. That is because it may be.
The morning La Nacion newspaper brought to those residents the happy news that the Water and Sewer Institute (A Y A for its Spanish acronym) has discovered that 2,000 cows live in a dairy up the Rio Macho, upriver from where these two towns draw their water. And every day, the workers dump the excrament in the river…
The dairy, owned by Egyptian businessman Mohamed Ibrahim el Ghanam and located in Cascajal de Coronado, was ordered to cease operations three years ago. But each time, the dairy tore down the Ministry of Health seals and continued operations without missing a beat, the newspaper said. Needless to say, the Enviroment Ministry people were greatly upset by this and now criminal action is being prepared against the dairy’s owner.
Although AyA’s potable water laboratory gave some startling coliform bacteria figures from the river itself, the same agancy’s Metropolitan Potable Water Treatment department chief, Dora Acuna, had some soothing words to say about the water treatment plant at Los Sitios, Moravia, making certain that Tibas and Moravia residents are not drinking a germ soup. Residents may be less than comforted.
As recently as last August, the newspaper reports, el Ghanam was served with yet again another stop order, but filed a demurrer that has still not been resolved. The newspaper’s reporters did a bit of calculation: 1965 cows, producing 25 to 40 kilos of excrament per day equals some 49,000 to 78,000 kilos per day. In pounds, that is 2.2 bls. per kilo which is…a heckuva lot of s–t.
October 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am
This farm is very close to where I live, in fact he is polluting the river that runs by my property. When this project was implemented, the Coronado paper ran an article about how great the modern agriculture techniques were that the Egyptian-US national was going to bring to Costa Rica. Plus the employment and economic advantages.
Unfortunately this farm has impacted our area in only a negative way with very little money returning to the local economy. This is a very specific example of a concept explained in the DVD and book The Corporation. Corporations, and in this case a business man, will always try to externalize costs. Rather than invest in a sewage treatment system, or even a simple holding tank, this project simply dumps all the fecal matter straight into the river, and in this case into the potable water supply.
And the crazy thing is that this farm could invest in a methane energy production system, which would sanitize the waste and produce energy that the farm could utilize in its dairy production, thereby increasing profits! IF too much energy or methane gas was produced the project could release the excess to the community in a number of ways. For example, donate methane for cooking to the local school kitchens.