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Hwange crisis update
Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF)
November 21, 2005

Thanks to those of you who assisted with funds, especially the SAVE Foundation of Australia, I was able to go to South Africa and purchase 2 new engines for the pumps in Hwange National Park as well as enough spare parts to repair another 20 engines. Thanks to Expeditors for clearing the goods so quickly and efficiently at the border.

In view of the critical situation up in Hwange, I went straight from South Africa to Hwange to try and get some water pumping as soon as possible. I delivered half the spares and one engine to Sinamatella and the balance to Robins Camp.

Joanne Buckley Lamb, a ZCTF team member has been based in Sinamatella for the past month. She has been monitoring the distribution of the fuel we delivered and she has been doing a wonderful job motivating the workshop staff to try and make up working engines out of the engines that aren't working. By doing this, she managed to get some water pumping at a few of the dry pans before I arrived but she has had some heartbreaking experiences during the past month.

In the small number of pans with water, the water levels are so low that the animals are having to wade into deep mud before being able to reach the water. In some places, the mud is more than 3 feet deep and in their desperation for water, the animals are inadvertently walking into a death trap because once they are stuck in the mud, they can't get out and many have died in the mud. National Parks staff are working against great odds to try and rescue these animals. In the case of the larger animals, like elephants this involves pulling them out using chains or rope and a tractor and sometimes the stress of this operation kills the animal anyway.

In the case of smaller animals, National Parks staff are wading, sometimes chest deep into the mud and rescuing them by pulling them out of the mud manually.

These dedicated National Parks staff are doing the best they can with very limited resources. Most of them are devoted to the welfare of the wildlife but they are short of chains and ropes and very few of their vehicles are mobile because they have no tyres. I saw numerous National Parks vehicles up on stands with no tyres. A very big thank you to Nets and Ropes who have donated 47kg of rope, Columbus McKinnon who are very kindly donating chains, AAT who have donated some tyres and Hivos who donated 2 500 litres of diesel. I will be taking all of this up to Hwange later this week.

Our first task, after delivering the spares to Sinamatella was to install a new engine at Inyantuie and get the water pumping into the pan there.

It was a great pleasure to hear the new engine fire up for the first time and watch the dry trough filling with water.

From there, we moved on to Shumba, still in the Sinamatella area where we did some minor repairs to the engine and fired it up. An engine which was supposed to be pumping water for drinking and toilet facilities at one of the National Parks safari camps was out of order so we repaired that as well.

We then went to Robins camp, delivered the rest of the spare parts and installed the second new engine at Little Tom. It was music to our ears to hear the engine start up because Little Tom hasn't had water for quite some time.

Our final stop in the Robins Camp area was Detema Pan where the engine wasn't pumping because it needed oil so we filled it with oil and fired it up.

We then made our way through Hwange National Park towards the Main Camp area. Whilst travelling from pan to pan, we saw a number of carcasses of animals that had succumbed to either dehydration or the "black leg" disease which was a terrible thing to see especially in the case of the elephants. It is not yet known for sure what causes this disease but it is thought that it may be due to not enough water being consumed or the fact that the animals are standing in contaminated mud for long periods of time. The feet start rotting, similar to gangrene and eventually the bones rot and break. There is no cure for this disease and the kindest thing to do is to put the animal down.

We are racing against time in our fight to save the animals in Hwange but we are slowly making progress thanks to the overwhelming support many of you are giving us. We still have a lot to do - many of the engines in the Main Camp area are out of order and most of the pans there are dry so we are now working on supplying another load of engines and spares to that area.

There are also numerous other miscellaneous items required in Hwange to help alleviate the problem such as:

• Buckets to wash the mud off the rescued animals
• Pick and shovels to remove excess mud from the pans
• Tyres, tubes and tyre repair kits
• Rope
• Engine oil
• Diesel
• Cement to repair the troughs
• I,5 to 2 ton block and tackle
• 1000m x 1,5 and 2 inch polythene pipe
• 150 x B144 'V' Belts
• 100m fuel hose
• 8mm gasket paper
• Silicone sealer
• 30 and 50hp submersible pumps
• Pipe wrenches - all sizes
• 2 inch gate valves

If anyone has any of these items lying around would like to help, please contact us on one of the telephone numbers below. The drop off point is 3 Fairbairn Drive Mount Pleasant. If you would like to email us, please send a new email to galorand@mweb.co.zw

Visit the ZCTF fact sheet

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