Survey Campaign in Mon Villages

From conversations with the Mon state Department of Rural Development, Thaton and Mudon townships are high-priority areas within Mon state, as both suffered from severe droughts during last year’s dry season. We will have further discussions with the government in order to identify at least 20 high-priority, water-stressed villages within these and other water-scarce townships. Specifically, we define water-stressed villages in accordance with UNHCR humanitarian water supply standards for prioritization of villages.

Following the initial 2-week training, the next phase of our plan is designed to achieve 2 goals in parallel:

• Build geophysics capacity among local engineers through a Trainer-of-Trainers (TOT’s) program, and
• Conduct DC-resistivity surveys to identify drilling locations for water-wells in ~20 water-stressed villages. Over the several months following, the UBC team will act in a consulting role with an on-the-ground presence for 3–5 months, while 5 of the top-performing engineers will be designated as TOT’s. These engineers will assume a leadership role during surveys. This will provide an opportunity for them to practice the skills they developed during the initial training and gain experience analyzing and interpreting geophysical data.

The survey campaign will consist of three stages:

• In the first week after training, we will perform surveys at 5 sites with productive well yields and 5 sites with unproductive well yields. This will provide us with baseline data sets that correlate with known successful and unsuccessful well locations.
• In the next phase, we will conduct DC-resistivity surveys in 5–10 high-priority, water-stressed villages. We will invert those data to identify drilling locations and estimate the depth to the water. Mon DRD will potentially perform drilling over the next several months (subject ongoing negotiations). During the drilling, we also hope to obtain geologic well logs, which will help further refine our interpretations of geophysical data.
• In the final stage, we will continue surveying in at least an additional 10–15 water-stressed villages. In collaboration with Mawlamyine University and pro-bono GIS consultant Melanie Stephens, we will create hydrogeologic maps which can be used as a guide for future groundwater exploration.