2009: Kate Kerigan Reporting from Singapore

We wanted to get hourly samples from our main sub-catchment for a 24-hour period, so this morning we went out and set the autosampler to trigger for a 24-hour cycle starting at noon. Later Li Jun, one of the NTU students helping us, called to say, "It's not obvious that the sampler did not trigger." Right. Translation: Go out and check the sampler, if you are lucky there will be samples. So it's midnight and Jessica and I just got back from checking the autusampler (the sampler bottles can't sit for more than six hours, hence the stealth night mission). It triggered, but there was an error, and none of the bottles had collected any water. There were also about 15 man-eating geckos that leaped out of the darkness for my jugular.

Cameron prepares to leave on the PUB boat.

The rest of the day was much less terrifying. Cameron headed out on the Singapore PUB boat again to collect reservoir water and sediment samples. Jessica worked the filters in the lab, and PUB took JP and me on a VIP tour of the most offensive sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the catchment.

JP said we shouldn't be afraid of what comes out of us.  Then he climbed down into every STP we found.

Kate checks the temperature of STP effluent.

We haven't had any appreciable rain events since we arrived, which has limited normal flushing from stormwater and thus prevented us from determining the location of upstream contaminant sources. The tour of some of the suspected main contributors of bacterial contamination was therefore very important to our tracking.

A chicken farm settling tank made out of the translucent glass windows used in bathrooms built in the 80s.

Influent to the chicken farm settling tank

We took a heap more samples from the sewers and a few surface channels yesterday and today, and then did our lab work to process them in a timely manner, according to EPA guidelines, of course. But I feel like I've written a lot about work, and that it may be a little dry, so I'm going to write a bit about what we did last night.

We went to Chinatown, which is a lot bigger than Boston's Chinatown (if you can believe that). Shinier, too. It's nearly Chinese New Year, so the entire island is blinged out with red and gold decorations, but Chinatown is exploding with them. After a mission of a subway ride, we emerged in the middle of one of the pedestrian-only streets, which is stuffed with different stalls selling red and gold lanterns, cards, pillows, sausages (we think), etc.

A stall on the pedestrian-only street in Singapore's Chinatown

After wandering for a little while, we ate dinner at this great hot-pot place. Cameron, Jessica and I got tasty seafood and steak hot pots and JP got a fried fish of some sort, which must have also been very tasty because he ate the entire thing, every bone. It was amazing.

Before heading home, we got some magnificent ice/cream/jelly creation and some road sodas for our walking tour. There were tons of cool temples and buildings to see and mysterious food samples being handed out.

A magnificent dessert

P.S. We ran out of rubber gloves today and the on-campus lab store won't sell us new boxes. I'm not exactly sure how to take this news. Hopefully we can fashion something out of the string and tape we have left.

My luggage went missing for a few days so I've had to spend my free time doing things like calling the airport and buying clean underwear. As a result, I haven't had a chance to start my blog until now. Here's a snapshot of our first week:

We arrived on our host campus, Nanyang Technical University (NTU), Monday morning and started off the week getting a tour of the impressive Environmental Engineering facilities along with a tour of our research site, the Kranji Catchment. Everyone at the university has been amazing, letting us borrow equipment and making us feel welcome.

We started our field work Tuesday, collecting the sampling bottles from each of the auto-sampler stations, taking them back to NTU for cleaning and then replacing them in the afternoon so they would be in place in case there was a rain event. There wasn't, but we did get some serious bright green back-flow from the reservoir that triggered one of our samplers.

Sampling at KC1

Wednesday had us out in the catchment again, this time taking samples. We got enough to keep us in the lab until 9:30 p.m. processing dilutions. I was still jetlagged and my luggage was still in Dubai, so morale got a little low on my end. But Thursday our hard work was rewarded with petri dishes full of E. coli—encouraging results since we were not sure we would get anything without a significant rain event.

Today we went back out into a sub-catchment of the Kranji Catchment that we've named KC2, after the sampling station it drains past. This particular area was seen to have higher E. coli counts in both NTU's and our sampling.

The KC2 channel

JP was feeling courageous so he climbed down a number of enormous sewer drains to get upstream stormwater samples for us. We got a few strange looks and a couple of questions from some old ladies that wanted to make sure we weren't terrorists, but so far no arrests. We came back with tons of samples and powered through them all in time to get dinner before the dining halls closed.

Before I forget, I'd like to give a shout-out to Lee Li Jun and Por Yu Ling, who are heroes to the MIT team. They have been helping us with everything from getting set up to finding and fixing our samplers.

Tomorrow we go to Malaysia for the weekend.