Tonga College solar system survives cyclone
Submitted by rjmackay on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 13:41
The EWBNZ Auckland Tonga team are pleased to report that the solar groundwater pumping scheme they installed at Tonga College in December 2009 survived cyclone Rene in February.
Tonga College were lucky the cyclone only hit them for an hour otherwise more damage to the school would have been seen. Tonga College Principal Mr Oko, says "All fruits on the fruit trees were blown off so we will shortly face a period of food shortage from this [but] the project is still in place, working well as expected".
The solar scheme was even used for boiling water and charging the teachers cell phones during a 2 day outage of mains electricity to the school following the cyclone!