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Dr. Cluff's history, philosophy and career highlights Inventing and installing water systems all over the world, for the United Nations and other organizations. A resume of developing pure water systems around the Planet Earth Dr. Cluff has provided consulting services to build water systems in the arid countries of Africa, Southeast Asia, North and South America. In Mali, Africa, the Wunderman Foundation wanted give something back to the people who made wooden carvings. "They wanted to help the people that were making the African carvings for their museum," Cluff said. Cluff designed and installed a water harvesting system for a village of 1,000 people in the Dogon region of Mali. "In the village the women would spend four hours to go for 20 liters of water up a dangerous cliff trail." The water harvesting system worked. A rainstorm filled Cluff's new system, saving many dangerous trips up the cliff. In 1982, Dr. Cluff visited Tanzania on contract to design water harvesting systems and solar energy for water and lighting in a village located about 100 miles from Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile. "I went to Africa with my friend who took me to a village. My friend had gone all the way from being raised in a prehistoric village, in the middle of Tanzania close to where Livingston met Stanley, to being a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University.. "What happened was that he wanted me to go back to the village to help them with water harvesting and solar energy. But in order to get there we had to go on the Central Railroad. That proved to be an exciting trip." "Tanzania had recently had a socialist revolution. They had rounded people up and put them in villages. They had a major catastrophe. All their chickens got sick and died because they were not used to being together. The people started dying of disease because of the same reason. "All the infrastructure stopped working. The trucks refused to take the farmers into the city Dar Es Salaam because there was too many ruts in the road. They had a food famine." "When I got there to ride the Central Railroad. We were stuffed onto this train exactly like sardines. We could not even go from our car to the dining car without extreme difficulty.. It took us six hours to go seven railroad cars. "Finally we did it, got to the dining car. We were concerned that we not step on the people. You had to study out every step." As you rode along this railroad, you look out and see all these wrecked railroad cars and you start to get concerned." Despite the politics, the communists and the desperate people, Dr. Cluff designed a water system for the local people to help free them of daily water struggles and water borne disease. A Mormon Missionary Young Cluff spent two years on the island of Oahu and the big island of Hawaii starting in 1955 as a missionary with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His journal entry of Tuesday, Nov. 6, 1956 reads: "Today was the election. Sounds like Ike is ahead." Cluff also served on the big island of Hawaii in Kona which has a desert side as dry as Arizona. After his service in Hawaii, he returned to the Arizona and enrolled in the University of Arizona at Tucson to study civil engineering. "That was the discipline of engineering that got me close to water. I wanted to go into water since I was a kid," he said. On the irrigated farm where he grew up, he saw how important water really was. "It was very difficult to go to the canal headgate and turn the water down the ditch to the next farm before the water had reached the end of our field. The Origin of the Cluffs The first Cluffs came from England to the new world in 1640. The Cluffs were people that lived in the glens not far from London. The Mormon patriarch David Cluff came to Arizona's Gila Valley in 1880. He had twelve sons. Today, there are more than 40,000 descendants among which Dr. Cluff is one. Dr. Cluff has three sons who are qualified engineers, including one Ph.D. The Black Mesa Project Between 1982 and 1985, Dr. Cluff headed a project funded by the Federal Bureau of Mines called the Black Mesa Project. Located about 60 miles south of Page, Arizona on the Navajo Indian Reservation, the project covered 40 acres of mine spoils. Under Cluff's direction the otherwise useless ground of coal mine spoils was treated with salt and a field of asphalt and plastic was laid as a water catchment. "This was an inexpensive way of making ground impervious in order to collect rain water," Cluff said. With 12 inches of rainfall per year in the high desert environment of Black Mesa, Cluff calculated the ability - with the ground treated with salt and asphalt/plastic catchments in place, that he could collect 330,000 gallons per acre per year. "We were able to show that you could turn worthless coal mine spoils into a self-contained, productive farm." The reservoir irrigated a 5-acre farm of carrots, lettuce, squash and tomatoes. "We perfected the system and how it worked. Unfortunately, the Navajo Indians did not use it. They said it was a whole lot easier to get a check from the government and buy food at the store." Dr Cluff developed a computer program for his Ph.D. dissertation that designed water harvesting agrisystems. It operated using the historical rainfall and evaporation data from the area where the design was made. The computer model operates the water harvesting system predicting runoff from the rainfall, storing the excess water in compartmented reservoirs, irrigating when needed. Repeated runs of the program would size the system so that the project would have an acceptable crop failure risk. The program was operated for conditions in Mali, Mexico as well as Tucson. It showed clearly the advantage of being able to irrigate crops as compared to dry land farming. The world can dramatically increase its food and water supply by using water harvesting agrisystems in marginal dry land faming areas.
Philosophy: "We have to go from the non renewable to the renewable and get off oil, diesel, coal and uranium. There are other technologies out there. If the world keeps going like they are now it will be like "Who took my cheese?" There will be a lot of people who will go back to the well to get their cheese and there won't be any. At that time there will be a lot of turmoil which will end civilization as we know it. It is essential that we switch to renewables now." Energy and Water Advisor to Arizona Governor Mecham In the 1980s, Dr. Carwin Brent Cluff got heavily involved in solar energy. "I realized that fossil fuels were not going to last forever." During his years as a Professor of Hydrology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Cluff carpooled and rode the bus for years to save energy. "In 1982, I went to one of gubernatorial candidate Evan Mecham's events. I talked to him about water and energy. We shared some of the same concerns. I helped out with his political campaign. In his 1986 campaign, I put up signs fifty feet away from the voting areas at several precincts on the night before the election. This time, Mecham was elected." The Governor borrowed me from the University of Arizona for six months to serve as his advisor. Governor Mecham called me in late November 1986 and, after a long conversation, accepted my proposal to take a leave from the University of Arizona and work for him. We spent 45 minutes together. He told me he had remembered our long talk four years earlier. He said he had wanted to talk to me. I refreshed his memory on water harvesting and spent a lot of time talking about recharge. I pointed out that I was not the most popular person with the Mayor of Tucson and others with vested interests. I worked directly under Sam Steiger as one of Governor Mecham's chief advisors. I was given the choice where to have my office, in the Water Resources or with the Solar Energy Commission. I chose to go to Water Resources because they had more office room, even though I spent more time working in energy than I did in water. I had been on the non-favored list with my supervisors at the University reaching all the way up to the president's office because of the politics involved in my research in both water and solar energy. Because of the interest from the new Governor, for a while they treated me with respect and even gave me an unscheduled raise. About a week or so later, after my interview with Governor Mecham, I was called by the University and was told they had accepted the Governor's request."
The fight for the all-recharge system for the
City of Tucson, Arizona "Storing water in the desert underground provides water security during drought years, plus a better quality water from the treatment the water gets during the recharge process," Cluff said. "The initiative was highly successful, we were way ahead in the polls even though our total budget was only $10,000. The business community of Tucson became alarmed, raised $100,000 and started running television ads showing the water being recharged through baby diapers, batteries and landfills, totally turning the election around, so we lost 2 to 1. That happened in Nov. of 1987". "Tucson wanted to build this expensive treatment plant because they got a hundred million dollars doing it from the consumers. There were some powerful forces that wanted the plant. The chemical companies wanted it. The water treatment director wanted it. The consultants wanted it so they would all be able to make money. So, the $100 million treatment plant was built and the water quality was terrible. The people found out we were right. There was another initiative in 1989 and this time we were successful with the help of businessman Bob Beaudry who shelled out thousands of dollars. I helped write the second initiative. This time we had money and we ran our own television ads and we won by about 2 to 1." "The hundred-million dollar water treatment plant is still sitting there not being used." "Through the second initiative we were able to stop the conventional chemical treatment of CAP water and go to a natural recharge method. Unfortunately, the area selected for the recharge to occur was the Avra Valley. The recharge rate in Avra Valley is very low. In addition, the consumers of Tucson will have a high pumping cost because the water has to be lifted 1,000 feet to get it from the deep ground water table over the mountains into Tucson. Tucson Water can change the recharge location at any time. They can also change to slowsand nanofiltration. They could use nanofiltration at a far less power cost than the recharge method they are now using in Avra Valley. . I helped educate the city of Tucson and indeed the State of Arizona about recharge. There are probably not many Tucsonans now who don't understand recharge. When we first started our campaign, very few people understood. There are several CAP recharge systems in the Phoenix and Tucson areas beside the Avra Valley System. I have always sought to do the best for the people regardless of the consequences. This is true when I was working for the University of Arizona and with Clean Water Products founded after retirement.. While at the University of Arizona Dr Cluff developed the technology of slowsand pretreatment of surface water including Central Arizona Project water from the Colorado River followed by nanofiltration. This took the hardness out of the water and also the organics which prevented the formation of trihalomethanes which are carcinogenic when the conventionally treated CAP water was chlorinated. A pilot plants was operated in Apache Junction as a University of Arizona project which showed clearly that the slowsand/nanofilter technology was perfect for CAP water. Following retirement a pilot plant was also set up and successfully operated by Clean Water Products in Las Vegas. Dr Cluff had first heard of nanofiltration at a world wide conference on water that he had attended in the fall of 1987 in Kuwait. The technology had just been discovered in 1986. He added the slowsand as a pretreatment with the catalytic conditioner to reduce calcium scaling and presented it to the University of Arizona to patent. The University turned all the rights to the technology back to the inventor Dr Cluff as they are required to do if they do not seek a patent. Dr Cluff obtained two patents on the technology. Following Dr. Cluff's retirement in 1994, he founded Clean Water Products and began to market the equipment and systems described in this web site. He built the first CWP100 for himself. The next two were built for neighbors. Many early units were sent to Brazil. The CWP100 would provide drinking water for an entire village from unusable ground water. This kept the village from having to leave & migrate during times of drought.Over the past 14 years Clean Water Products has built hundreds of RO systems including two 250,000 GPD skids in Ft Sumner, New Mexico, 60,000 GPD slowsand/seawater RO skid in the Bahamas, and a 100,000 GPD system to provide water for the Desert Diamond Casino in Tucson Arizona. The slowsand filter has proven to be very reliable in pretreatment of both surface brackish water and seawater. The catalytic conditioner has eliminated chemical use which reduces maintenance cost both in materials and wages of operators.
One of the most interesting concepts developed by Dr. Cluff is the use of the Slowsand Filter/Nano/Seawater RO for making seasalt. The slowsand takes the sediment out of seawater that then goes into a nanofilter which concentrates the calcium, magnesium and trace minerals 3 times as compared to the sodium content in conventional sea salt. This gives a very valuable product that can be solar evaporated and sold for a price that would easily pay for the entire distillation equipment in a matter of a few weeks. A 60,000 GPD system would produce 20,000 pounds of sea salt per day. The retail value of the salt in US or European markets could be as high as $10.00 per pound. The salt could subsidize the production of water which could be used to grow crops on desert coastal areas which would in turn reduce carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide credits could accrue. The seawater systems could be operated using biodiesel produced using some of the water. It would be a Win Win project. |
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