Bondsteel battles skepticism of local water with sophisticated purification plant
By Kevin Dougherty,
Stars and Stripes
Kevin Dougherty / Stars and Stripes
Civilian Jason Douglass, a Brown & Root services employee, manages the water
purification plant at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. |
CAMP BONDSTEEL, Kosovo — The folks who manage the water at Camp Bondsteel have a
problem.
It’s not bacteria or nitrates. It’s not lead or copper. It’s not even
the infrastructure.
It’s an image problem. Many servicemembers at the largest base camp in Kosovo
don’t trust the water, although Robert “Butch” Gatlin insists they should.
“We produce better water than what you drink,” Gatlin said, pointing at a
half-liter container of bottled water.
Gatlin is director of engineering for Brown & Root Services in Kosovo. The
Texas-based company handles construction and maintenance work on U.S. military
installations in the Balkans.
“Once you go down 400, 500 feet,” Gatlin said, “you run into pure, pure
water.”
The quality of the water is so good that Gatlin believes it should be bottled and given
to the troops. Maybe even sold commercially, he said, but that’s for the U.S. Army to
decide.
Capt. Jackie Durant has already made up her mind about Gatlin’s claim.
“There is nothing to fear, if people have a fear of drinking the
water,” said Durant, head of preventive medicine for Task Force Falcon.
“We’re ready, but this may be ahead of our time, in terms of doctrine and
training.”
For generations, she said, soldiers have been “trained to fear the water”
whenever or wherever they deploy. The books say to treat suspect water by boiling or
treating it with iodine tablets.
And with each deployment, the military seems ever more wedded to the idea of bottled
water as the primary source. Base camps and remote outposts in Kosovo, for example, have
boxes and boxes and boxes of the stuff.
Getting soldiers to trust tap water isn’t going to be easy.
“When we came here, there was no source of water,” Durant said of Camp
Bondsteel, built atop a sprawling hillock. “Our only option was to drill. That was
our only choice.”
Not exactly.
The Army and Brown & Root could have decided to duplicate what was done in Bosnia,
Gatlin said. But no one wanted to repeat that misstep. A lot of time and money went down
the drain buying and shipping in bottled water. Officials then decided to process the
available water. Finally, the decision was made to drill their own wells in Bosnia.
“For Kosovo, we decided we needed to go to [the] end state first, instead of
stair-stepping,” Gatlin said.
The work commenced a couple of weeks after KFOR troops rolled into Kosovo in June 1999.
That’s when a Greek company started drilling for water at Bondsteel. A similar
campaign followed at Monteith.
Today, there are eight wells at Bondsteel and three at Monteith.
Five of the eight wells at Bondsteel are active and three have been set aside for
contingency purposes, Gatlin said. In addition, the base camp has a large water treatment
plant, above-ground water storage tanks, six miles of water mains, a waste-water facility
and three retention ponds.
The Tennessean likens the infrastructure to a municipal facility that serves 25,000 to
50,000 people.
Kevin Dougherty / Stars and Stripes
The aquifer below Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo contains several hundred feet of premium water.
It is pumped to the surface and treated at the base's water purification plant, manged by
civilian Jason Douglass. Many people know the Brown & Root employee by his Desert
Storm nickname - "Doogie Howzer." |
“There are a lot of pipes in the ground,” Gatlin said.
The Monteith system, which has two active wells and another in reserve, was completed
before Bondsteel. It is smaller and doesn’t have such an extensive water distribution
system. Gatlin referred to it as a “closed system,” a final state Bondsteel is
expected to reach once the large water bladders and other appendages are no longer needed.
Each site includes some of the most sophisticated technology available, Gatlin said as
he drove his four-wheel-drive vehicle toward the water treatment plant on Bondsteel. The
facility also features Well No. 2, which sits atop what he calls “the mother
lode.”
At a depth of about 600 feet, the well taps into a large pool of water. The aquifer is
roughly 700 feet deep, or the equivalent of a 70-story building. Gatlin doesn’t know
the breadth of the acquifer, but the cavity seems immense.
Another well on the 1,000-acre camp draws water from a 400-foot pocket.
“There is a lot of water out there,” Gatlin said.
The treatment facility at Well No. 2 handles between 320,000 gallons and 350,000
gallons a day, providing water to the living quarters on base. It has the capacity to
process a half-million gallons, according Jason Perry Douglass, Brown & Root’s
water purification foreman for Kosovo.
“This is the biggest water project that Brown & Root has ever
undertaken,” Douglass said. “We planned for the big picture on this one.”
Gatlin isn’t so sure this is the company’s largest water project, but it is
the largest project of its kind for the U.S. military.
“It’s never been tried at a base camp,” Gatlin said of the
project’s scope.
The hope is that soldiers will begin to trust the water and start to drink it, which
would greatly lessen the need to buy bottled water.
“The only problem is accessibility,” said Durant, who normally heads the
133rd Medical Detachment in Hanau, Germany.
Water fountains planned for later this year will solve that deficiency. Durant may also
launch a campaign to encourage consumption, whether a servicemember is at main base camp
or a remote outpost. In the latter case, the water arrives by truck.
The chance of anyone tampering with the well water is slim, Gatlin said. The wells are
deep and located well off the perimeter fence. If there were a problem, there are enough
contingency wells to pick up the slack.
Durant, who has tested the water scores of times, believes it is “the same as, if
not better” than the water back at her post in Hanau.
“The water,” she said, “is ready to drink.”
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