Handpump vs motorized borehole: how to tell them apart in satellite imagery

You've got a GPS list from the last WASH assessment, half of it three years old, and a district where fuel and time don't stretch far enough to drive every point. Before you build the route, it helps to know which sites are handpumps and which are motorized, because the two need completely different follow-up. A handpump with a cracked rising main needs a mechanic and a spare parts kit. A motorized scheme with a dead solar charge controller needs a different kind of visit, and probably a different budget line.

A point on a map won't tell you. At 0.3 m or finer, the imagery usually will, and it's worth learning the tells before spending a day driving to confirm something you can rule out from a desk.

What a handpump site looks like from above

Handpump installations are small. Look for a concrete apron somewhere in the range of two to four meters across, often roughly circular or hexagonal, sitting slightly proud of the surrounding ground. There's usually a drainage channel or small soak pit running off to one side, visible as a darker linear feature where runoff has stained or saturated the soil.

The footpaths give the site away more reliably than the pad does. A working handpump draws people from every direction, and over months that traffic wears visible trails converging on the apron like spokes on a wheel. No shed, no fencing, no solar array, no elevated tank. If the only built structure at a point is a small pad with trails running into it, you're almost certainly looking at a handpump.

At very fine resolution you can sometimes pick out the shadow of the pump handle itself, a short dark line off the pad. Don't count on it. Sun angle, shadow length, and the specific handpump model all affect whether that's visible, and you'll lose it entirely with a near-nadir pass.

What gives away a motorized borehole

Motorized sites have more going on, and that's the point. Look for an elevated tank stand first: a round or square tank shadow sitting on top of a visible support structure, usually casting a longer, denser shadow than anything else nearby. Pair that with one of two power signatures. Solar-powered sites show a tight grid of dark rectangular panels, usually angled and mounted on a frame close to the pump house. Grid or generator-powered sites instead show a small shed or kiosk roof, sometimes with a wider, more compacted apron where a fuel delivery vehicle or maintenance truck has been parking.

Pipe networks are the other tell. A handpump serves itself. A motorized scheme usually feeds a network, so you'll see straight linear scars in the soil, trenching lines running out from the pump house toward one or more standpipes or tapstands some distance away. A tank stand with pipe trenches radiating toward multiple tapstand points is a reticulated scheme, whatever the original asset list called it.

Where it stays genuinely ambiguous

Some sites won't resolve cleanly. A tank stand with no solar panels and no fuel-vehicle apron could be a grid-connected pump with the controller box too small to see, or it could be a gravity-fed tank with no mechanized pump at all, just a spring source upstream. Low sun angle helps here: long shadows late in the morning or afternoon can reveal a controller box, fencing, or genset shed that's invisible closer to midday. If a point still won't resolve after checking the sharpest available pass, it goes on the verify-in-field list rather than getting guessed at from a desk. That's a shorter list than the one you started with, and it's the one your fuel budget should go toward.

This kind of read only works if you've got a clean, dated inventory of every built structure showing up on the imagery to begin with, not a scatter of old GPS waypoints of uncertain age. That's the gap an annual point inventory of borehole, tank stand, and latrine infrastructure is built to close, so the pump-type call above is one you're making against this year's imagery instead of last year's field notes.

If you're staring down a district list with more unverified points than field days, it might be worth seeing what a current pass would actually show you.