Water Works

My siblings and I use to play a game on the beach that we called “Water Works”. All you need for this game is a hose with running water, a bucket and a sandy beach. You turn on the hose and it begins to fill the bucket. The game starts when the water overflows from the container and starts. 

The goal of this game is stop the water from reaching a helpless little sand village from the incoming flood. We built dykes and reservoirs to divert the water from the path of the village. Water would continually rise in our reservoirs and we would struggle to build our walls taller and thick enough to withstand the added erosion and pressure in the system. 

The grassy remains of a ponds that was washed out last year. 

 Two other ponds were also washed out that were downstream from the breach. 

Inevitably there would be a break and the wall would collapse causing water to enter the next set of frantically built reservoirs. The real fun begins when we decided to pour out the bucket and a surge of water enters the system. “A Breach!” We tried our best but the sand village couldn’t be saved. It was always a blast playing this game but I never realized that I was learning something that might be useful in the future.

In drought years and the dry season, ponds and streams will dry up completely. 

One of the main forms of tilapia aquaculture here is to dig a small pond that has access to a year round source of water. Sometimes there can be a series of reservoirs where water from a stream passes through a consecutive chain of ponds. It’s a setup that closely resembles the series of reservoirs from our water works game. A stream is the consistent source of running water and fishponds are the reservoirs, but there’s still one more factor in the system, a sudden surge of water, the rain. 

Even a small stream like this can swell up in
the wet season and cause flooding issues.

Malawi is a country that’s already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Weather events are getting more extreme, some years drought will dry out ponds that had access to year round water and in other year’s severe rains will flood the same area. Both events cause issues for aquaculture but it’s the rain that can cause the most destruction. One breach upstream and the rushing water will break every wall it encounter as it rushes downstream. 

It’s from playing the water works game that I’ve been able to think of possible design modifications, that would reduce the damage done to downstream ponds in the increasingly likely situation where a breach occurs upstream. It's not a project that I'm working on directly but it's interesting to reflect on how experiences will shape your thoughts and ideas, not only work experiences but also experiences from playing games and as far back as childhood.