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Kitoongo School Well Saved -Hannington and Joseph working together with John and Ken in the States were able to come up with a fishing tool and successfully remove the well pipes and parts that had broken off and fallen down to the bottom of the well in Kitoongo. Two drilling companies had already tried and failed to remove the 22 pipes, sucker rods and pump stuck in the mud at the bottom of the bore hole.
Joseph was able to fabricate a "fishing tool" from locally available parts and weld the fixture in such a way as to either grab onto the end of the sucker rod or the 1 1/4 inch pipe sleeve, if it was still there. On the first attempt the device successfully grabbed onto something but they were only able to lift a few inches with just man power. That told them they at least had a good hold on the sucker rods that operate the pump. Using poles cut from the bush and with local help they attempted to get the pump and pipes unstuck from the bottom of the well. It quickly became clear that manpower alone was not going to be enough to get them out.
Moses from Gospel Messengers Schools made arrangements for a tow truck with a winch several days later to give it another try. Once on site and hooked up to the winch the guys held their breath as the trucks tires squished down and the winch groaned under the strain. They told each other that there was no way they would have ever been able to lift that much weight by hand. Thepump had settled down into several feet of mud at the bottom of the well and was quite stuck. However, with a little finesse and patience the winch did it's work maintaining the load and allowing the pump to work its way loose from the mud. They were then able to use the trucks winch to pull all of the lost equipment out of the bore hole and store it away. Some of it could be used in the future but most of it turned out to be very corroded and useless.
Turns out that the galvanized pipes and sucker rods that come into Uganda from India are of very low quality and tend to rust / corrode through very quickly. This is the second time we have had a failure caused by the outside 1 1/4" pipe breaking off at the last threads of a coupling and falling into the well. Unfortunately you don't know that until you are opening the well to find out what has failed and the whole works falls in.
Fortunately we have found a supplier in Kampala (Victoria Engineering LTD) that has much higher quality parts available and their own zinc tank on site to perform the galvanizing process. We will be using their parts from now on in all of our well projects. They can be found here on the web; www.victoria-engineering.ug
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