Dan Smith (New Zealand, 41 years old) was hired to build boats and ended up saving thousands of liters of water a day.
He doesn't know if he is more proud of how the AC75 boat sails in the sea off Barcelona six months before the start of the America's Cup or of the noisy machine that hides in one of the barracks at the Alinghi Red Bull Racing base in the Maremagnum, in the Catalan capital.
He opens the door of the barracks, fills a glass of water from an unconventional tap and offers it to his interlocutors.
“Here, you'll see that it's very good,” he says.
Does not lie.
He is.
“Every day we drink and clean the boats with this water.
We couldn't be throwing away thousands of liters of drinking water when the city lacks it,” he explains.
Smith learned about the Catalan drought at the end of 2022. Photos of the discovered Sau reservoir church flooded the pages of newspapers and he was struck by its significance as a water indicator.
“I read that when part of the bell tower was discovered it meant that there was a lack of water in the reserves.
And the church was whole!”
He took the car with his family and went to see the swamp personally.
“It was shocking to see the water levels so low.”
The overall reservoirs in Catalonia were at 33% of their capacity.
Now, they barely exceed 15% and the Generalitat decreed phase 1 of the drought emergency a week ago.
Still shocked, Smith crunched the numbers.
To clean the
AC75
, the Alinghi Red Bull used about 1,500 liters of fresh water.
And if I added the
chasing boats
(the boats that follow the sports sailboat and analyze its performance data up to the minute when it goes out into the water), the
spy boat
(shares information with the rest of the teams to avoid traditional espionage) and the common use From a base with 130 workers, the figure reached 5,000 liters per day.
Too much.
“It was a lot of water.
And we felt that if citizens made efforts to combat the drought, we had to do them too.”
Why can't you clean a boat with salt water?
“After the water evaporation process, the salt remains and corrodes the carbon of the hull.
“It damages the boat,” responds Smith, who has been based in Barcelona with the rest of the team since 2022 to prepare for this 2024 edition.
A former mechanic at a private boat company and current equipment builder, Smith knew that some yachts had small circuits to purify salt water and asked his superiors to create a desalination mechanism.
He contacted a company in Girona, with whom he devised special filters: making river water drinkable is not the same as port water, especially contaminated by diesel from boats.
After settling permanently in September 2023 at the new Maremagnum base, the team established the new purification circuit in a barrack.
A pump extracts water directly from the sea and 10% becomes water for human consumption once the salt and all harmful elements have been filtered out.
The remaining 90% is returned to the sea.
The consumable water is stored in a tank with various projections, depending on the intended use.
“This water is better than the city's,” claims Smith, who points to the water treatment plant indicator to demonstrate it: 79 ppm (
parts per million
in English, one of the values that indicates the level of substances in the water), less of the 112 that are included in the latest report on the water quality of El Prat de Llobregat.
The machine can convert between 12,000 and 15,000 liters of water per day, and since its start-up four months ago, the team has saved about 600,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to the maximum consumption in emergency phase 1 (200 liters per day) of about 3,000 people in this period.
The team does not specify the cost of the water treatment plant.
“A few dozen thousand euros,” they say from the command posts, without giving more details.
The positive part is that the energy necessary to start the water treatment plant is covered by the solar panels installed on the roof of the base.
“Saving this water has no economic cost.
This is also an ecological project.”
Now the Port of Barcelona has become interested in the Alinghi water treatment plant, and the America's Cup organization itself has informed the teams that they will have to take measures to save water.
“Smith's idea was brilliant.
I don't know why there aren't more machines like these elsewhere, honestly.
The situation requires it,” concludes a senior Alinghi official.
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