Site Visits

So, on Tuesday, the Head of Infrastructure, three other new engineers, and I loaded into an MCA truck and started off on four days of site visits. Our goal was to get a more complete picture of the breadth and location of projects that we’re working on. Here is a quick photo montage from the trip.

This is the future site of the Mpilo Reservoir, which will have a 75 million liter capacity. It's going to be supplied from the Metolong Dam, which begins construction next year.


This is the High North Reservoir. It is higher than the future Mpilo Reservoir and will feed the outskirts of Maseru that have started to push up the surrounding plateaus.


This is a spring catchment that supplies Mokhotlong Camp Town. There are intake grates just below were the guys are standing. The two structures are silt boxes. So they bring in water, which is often muddy, and let the silt settle to the bottom before the water is piped down to the water treatment works via gravity.


This is my room at the Mokhotlong Hotel. Yes, that is a sink next to my bed. And, yes, the toilet matched the sink in it's fire engine red color.


This is the Letseng Diamond Mine in Mokhotlong District. It is massive and is one of the most productive diamond mines in the world. That sand pile must be at least 300 meters tall.

This is a typical, if quite large, reservoir that will be built in rural water supply schemes. It's a very simple brick structure with a concrete coated interior.

This is some typical terrain that contractors will have to navigate in order to get materials to rural water supply projects. Sitting in the middle in the back seat was not a pleasure during our treks over these types of "roads."

This is a spring that used to be protected, but was badly built. Contractors will come and dig out around the spring a little better and build a better protecting structure. Then they'll pipe the water just down the hill maybe 6 meters to a water point, which is a small reservoir with taps coming out.

This is a picture taken in the mountains of Thaba Tseka district. The entire Eastern side of Lesotho has terrain like this. It's going to be very challenging for contractors to get to some of the villages, and some of the villages cannot even be accessed with 4x4 trucks.

Below are pictures from Katse dam. It's a 185 meter tall dam that was built in the '90s to supply water to South Africa. The reservoir behind it stretches 45km up the valley. Water is taken to South Africa via a huge tunnel that runs north, but stops first at Muela Dam, which is a hydroelectric dam that produces about 100 megawatts of electricity. Ntate Chalatse, who is the Head of Infrastructure at MCA, did quality control for the Katse dam. The picture doesn't quite give you an idea of the scale of the dam, but the white door near the lower spillway can fit a semi-truck in it. The group shot is from the backside of the dam.



These are parabolic solar cookers. The owner can fit 5 loaves of bread at a time into the black cylinder at the center. She then faces the mirror at the sun and it takes about 40 minutes to bake the bread.


These are just some photos I liked from the trip.