Solar panels on wheels bring much-needed water to besieged Syria town

DOUMA, Syria: Solar panels on wheels make for a strange sight on the streets of Syria's besieged Douma, but the makeshift generator is helping local residents secure water.

Douma lies outside the capital Damascus, in the rebel stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, and has been under a suffocating government siege since 2013.

Residents have had no electricity for four years, relying instead on generators for everything from lighting to refrigeration.

But the siege also means generator fuel is expensive and increasingly rare, which is where the solar panel generator comes in.

It trundles around the city, powering the water pumps residents use to draw supply from underground wells, and helping fill the electricity supply gap.

“The most important thing for a family is to secure water. A house without water is a house without life,” said Abu Mohammad Ahmad, an engineer and local council member who supervises the project.

The generator is a simple setup, just 12 solar panels and six batteries mounted on an iron cart. The panels each have a capacity of 100 watts a day, and are also used to power the batteries, which serve as a back-up on days when the panel supply is low.

The project supplies local schools, as well as mosques and communal water tanks.

As the cart is pushed and pulled to its next destination, residents weave around it on bicycles, which have become a favoured mode of transport in the city because of the fuel shortages.

Arriving at a blue communal water tank, one of the generator's operators unfurls a cord from the device and connects it to an electric pump.

Soon the chug of the pump is accompanied by the splashing of water filling up the tank.

Local residents arrive with buckets and big plastic bottles to fill up.

Nearby stands Abu Akram, 52, who once owned a minimarket but lost his livelihood when the shop was destroyed in bombardment.

“This is the most successful project in the Ghouta region,” he told AFP over the gush of water.

“We used to draw water by using generators, but we're besieged, and fuel is hard to find and very expensive,” he added.

He and his neighbours would sometimes club together to buy a single litre of fuel so they could pump up enough water to fill a tank.

“But this project is free and it has helped us a lot,” he said. — AFP