Southland Solution for Thirsty World?
Somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there are refugees in desperate need of water. On the 10th fairway of the Simi Hills Golf Course, there is Khosrow Bakhtar and his amazing contraption, which he believes is the answer to their prayers. At first glance, it does not inspire confidence. Bakhtar’s Earth Radar device looks like a tractor pulling a very crude plow. Golfers stare at it uncertainly, the way they might greet a Chevy Nova abandoned on the back nine.
But Bakhtar and his sponsors on this late-winter morning see only a thing of beauty.
The inventor had just demonstrated how his machine can locate and map underground water sources--a topic of great interest to the operators of the golf course but of even greater consequence to people in arid parts of the Third World, for whom a dry well can spell death.
“I think it’s very, very important,” said Jones Kyazze, the director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), who was among about two dozen people attending the demonstration, held recently at the golf course in Simi Valley.
Bakhtar, an Iranian-born mining engineer educated in Britain and the United States, developed the machine while under contract to the Air Force to locate underground munitions. More recently, he has been working with a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization, Operation U.S.A., to use the technology for humanitarian purposes.
“The site conditions here today,” Bakhtar was saying, “are sunny and windy.”
“And hazardous,” observed one man in the small audience of engineers, hydrologists and humanitarian officials.
Thwack!
Bakhtar scrambled for cover. A ball landed a few yards away with an ominous plock!
This genesis of this odd moment was the meeting, several years ago, of Bakhtar and Richard Walden, president and chief executive of Operation U.S.A. At the time, Walden was campaigning for increased technology transfers from the military to humanitarian organizations. His main interest was in technology that would help locate and remove land mines, a focus of his 23-year-old organization.
Mines, often made largely of plastic and buried just beneath the ground, are notoriously difficult and dangerous to detect. Bakhtar thought his device--capable, he said, of peering 600 feet beneath the earth’s surface and creating three-dimensional images of even plastic objects--might help.
It was in the course of a PowerPoint demonstration at Bakhtar’s office in Newport Beach that Walden noticed a broad blue band in one of the underground radar images.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Water,” Bakhtar said.
“Do you know that’s more important than finding land mines?” Walden asked.
Since then, Bakhtar has retooled the device for civilian use, making it so easy, he said, that almost anyone could be quickly trained to use it. Only two questions remain:
Will someone pay to give it a field test, ideally in an Afghan refugee camp where U.N. officials are paying a fortune to truck in water?
And does the thing actually work?
The answer to the first is maybe. The answer to the second: a conditional yes.
Government May Finance Project
The U.S. State Department has said it would consider bankrolling an Earth Radar mission to Pakistan. Joseph Bracken, an official with the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, said his office is waiting for a formal proposal from UNICEF in conjunction with Operation U.S.A.
As for whether it works, the device appeared to pass its test in Simi Valley with flying colors, and Bakhtar has a loyal core of believers. However--here is the conditional part--there also are people with expertise in the field who say his claims sound impossible.
There is nothing new about the idea of ground-penetrating radar. Geologists, oil companies and the military have used the technology for years. But hydrologists and geophysicists say it is best used at relatively shallow depths, making it of limited use for finding water, especially in difficult-to-penetrate soil such as clay. In such conditions, said Temple University geophysicist Jonathan Nyquist, someone using ground radar might be lucky to see images 30 feet below the surface.
Six hundred feet? “I just don’t buy it,” Nyquist said.
William Clement, a hydrologist at the Center for Geophysical Investigation of the Shallow Subsurface at Boise State University, said state-of-the-art ground radar can generally penetrate about 65 feet. In ideal conditions--the Sahara Desert, for instance--it might go as deep as 100 feet, he said.
Six hundred feet? Not a chance.
Bakhtar acknowledged with a chuckle that his technology “basically defies the laws of physics” by rethinking the way in which radar waves can be focused. By using “forced resonance,” which tailors the radar wavelength to the environment, he said, he can penetrate any material. And yes, he said, it will go as deep as 600 feet if it is outfitted with a larger antenna.
Amir Fijany, a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said JPL scientists have been sufficiently impressed by Bakhtar’s Earth Radar to propose using it to find water on Mars. NASA is considering the idea, he said.
Edward Jacobs, a civilian program manager at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, said Earth Radar had proved effective in finding deeply buried projectiles at bombing ranges, although the depth of the munitions was classified. “They went deep, but I can’t tell you how deep,” he said.
Although he wouldn’t reveal how much the government paid for Earth Radar, Jacobs said the device probably had paid for itself the first time it was employed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, because it saved the military from using far more laborious methods to find unexploded ordnance.
“It has been of considerable use to the government,” he said.
According to Walden, Bakhtar’s technology has also been used to search for tunnels along the North Korea-South Korea and U.S.-Mexico borders. Jacobs said he could not confirm that.
At this point, Earth Radar cannot be used to hunt for land mines because they would explode if it were dragged over them. Bakhtar and Walden are talking about trying to use it from an airborne platform, such as a hovercraft, but said they have technical hurdles to clear first.
In operation, Earth Radar resembles nothing so much as a tractor mower. In his golf course demonstration, Bakhtar drove it about 10 yards, turned around and drove back on a parallel course, then back again and so on until he had covered a patch of ground about 10 yards long and 10 yards wide. A computer attached to the tractor recorded the radar readings, which could then be plotted onto graph-like maps. On the golf course, he said, the readings reached down about 100 feet and showed a water table beginning about 63 feet beneath the surface.
Portability Seen as Advantage
Existing hydrological data indicate a water table within about five feet of that, according to Jim Evensen, a hydrogeologist who wrote his master’s thesis on the water basin on which the Simi Hills course is perched. Evensen, who attended the Earth Radar demonstration, said he was impressed by Bakhtar’s invention, especially because it is relatively portable.
“There are technologies that do similar things,” he said, “but they’re really not portable and they’re not easy to get out to job sites.” Those technologies rely on seismic, rather than radar, waves, he said.
Similarly, Ted Kuepper, an environmental engineer who does volunteer work for Global Water, a humanitarian organization that helps people in Third World countries develop water resources, said he hasn’t seen any high-tech equipment used to find water in poor places. “There’s a tremendous disconnect in bringing state-of-the-art technology to developing countries,” he said.
There is little dispute about the need. The United Nations says 1.1 billion people lack adequate drinking water. Hundreds of thousands die each year of diseases related to a lack of pure water.
Kyazze, the UNESCO official, said he hopes that Bakhtar will soon be piloting his tractor--or, perhaps, a sport utility vehicle with an Earth Radar attachment--across the site of an Afghan refugee camp.
Until now, he said, three words have described the technology used to find water resources in the developing world: “trial and error.”
