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Seabee Restores Water, Brings Comfort to Primary School

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS070927-01
Release Date: 9/27/2007 11:13:00 AM

By Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kelly E. Barnes, USNS Comfort Public Affairs

EAST BANK DEMERARA, Guyana (NNS) -- Upon the conclusion of a three-day project Sept. 26, a primary school of 1,400 students in East Bank Demerara, now has running water, thanks to a Seabee attached to hospital ship USNS Comfort’s (T-AH 20) embarked Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 202.

Utilitiesman 2nd Class (SCW) Charlie King restored connections between Grove Primary School’s water reservoirs to the water pumps and from the water pumps to the rest of the school.

“It’s important to have running water,” King said. “I don’t know how long they’ve been without running water, but it looks like it’s been a long time.”

According to Wendy Chichester, Grove’s senior mistress, the water and plumbing systems began having problems about five years ago. The water sometimes cut off completely, but Chichester explained the water pressure was usually very low.

“This has been a problem because we need water for cleaning,” Chichester said. “Most of the kids bring their own water to school because they can’t trust the water here to be working.”

King also piped in a water flushing system in the children’s bathrooms and installed a water-level sensor in the school’s water holding tank so it doesn’t overflow.

“They’ve had some problems with the well flooding and wasting all their water,” King said. “Now that the sensor is there, it won’t spill all over the schoolyard anymore.”

In addition to all the repairs King made to the school’s plumbing system, a slew of his fellow Seabees repainted the exterior of one of the school’s buildings, added a fence around the perimeter of the whole school and made lighting and electrical repairs in several classrooms.

The Comfort team will remain in Guyana until Oct. 1, then will continue its last leg of its four-month humanitarian deployment to Latin America and the Caribbean providing medical assistance to patients in a dozen countries.