At six each morning, four tanker trucks leave a filling station on the edge of Keshen and drive the gravel road into Sennett Camp, where eighteen thousand people have lived long enough that the camp has its own address on regional maps, its own postal code, and a listing on the regional bus timetable that treats it as a town rather than an emergency site.

Sennett opened nine years ago as a response to flooding along the Coren Valley that coordinators at the time expected to last a season. The valley’s main river breached an embankment upstream that spring after a wet winter, displacing close to twenty-two thousand people in a single week and destroying enough farmland that the original relief plan assumed most residents would return within eight months, once the water receded and planting resumed. It has since become something closer to a small town, minus the infrastructure a town takes for granted: no piped water network, no grid connection, no paved road linking it to Keshen beyond the gravel track the tanker trucks use every morning.

The road itself has its own history of failure. It washed out twice in the camp’s first four years, once for eleven days during a storm that cut off deliveries entirely and forced coordinators to ration the camp’s emergency reserve down to under five litres per person before a temporary crossing could be built. The Halven Basin regional government has since paved a short stretch nearest Keshen but left the remaining gravel section unimproved, citing cost.

“People think the hard part is tents and blankets,” said camp technical officer Grace Osafo, who has worked at Sennett for six of its nine years. “The hard part is water. The hard part is diesel. Those don’t stop needing to arrive just because the emergency is over.”

The daily supply run

Camp logistics break down into three recurring deliveries that coordinators track on a whiteboard in the technical office, updated in grease pencil each morning before the first truck leaves Keshen:

  • Water: four tanker runs a day from Keshen, totalling around 200,000 litres, distributed through standpipes to eleven sectors.
  • Fuel: diesel for the camp’s generators, trucked in twice a week and rationed against a schedule that prioritises the clinic and the water pumps.
  • Food: dry rations distributed monthly, with a smaller weekly top-up of perishables that depends on which roads are passable.

The Halven Basin Water Authority sets a guideline of fifteen litres per person per day for a settlement of Sennett’s size. Camp records show residents currently receive closer to eleven, a shortfall Osafo attributes to a funding gap rather than a supply problem.

“We could truck in more water tomorrow if the fuel budget allowed it,” she said. “The trucks aren’t the bottleneck. The diesel to run them is.”

Power is rationed more visibly. Generators run roughly four hours a day, concentrated around evening hours when residents cook and children do schoolwork by lamp. The clinic and water pumps have separate, smaller generators that run longer, but even those go quiet for maintenance most Tuesdays, a gap camp staff have learned to plan medical procedures and pump repairs around rather than fight.

Nine years since the emergency

Sennett’s first year ran on a different logistics model entirely. An international relief consortium managed the site under an emergency mandate, flying in bottled water and running generators around the clock on a budget that, according to consortium records later handed to the Resettlement Coordination Office, cost nearly four times what the camp’s current trucked-water system costs per resident.

“Emergency logistics and long-term logistics are not the same problem, even though they look similar from the outside,” said Petra Wenlock, a logistics consultant who advised the transition from the consortium’s model to the Coordination Office’s current one five years ago. “You cannot fly in bottled water for a camp that’s going to exist for a decade. The budget doesn’t survive contact with year two.”

The handover, completed in stages between years three and five, replaced air deliveries with the current truck route, added the standpipe network, and cut the camp’s per-resident cost by more than half. It also fixed in the water target the shortfall Osafo now describes: the new system was sized to the water table nearest Keshen rather than to the fifteen-litre guideline, a decision Wenlock said was a deliberate trade-off at the time rather than an oversight.

“We built a system that could run for years on the budget that was actually likely to keep coming,” Wenlock said. “That meant setting the target lower than the guideline from the start. Nobody loved that decision. It also meant the trucks are still running nine years later instead of the whole system collapsing in year four.”

A second camp, a different arithmetic

Forty kilometres south, the smaller Camp Dorrin runs a version of the same system with one significant difference: a solar array, installed three years ago with a one-time grant from a regional development fund that Sennett was not eligible for because of its larger size.

Dorrin’s generator runtime has fallen from four hours a day to under one, according to site manager Yusuf Adeyemi, who previously worked at Sennett before transferring south. Diesel deliveries there have dropped from twice weekly to once every ten days.

“I ran the same fuel schedule at Sennett that Osafo runs now,” Adeyemi said. “Coming here and watching the diesel truck show up once every ten days instead of twice a week, it’s hard not to think about what Sennett could look like with the same investment, just at a bigger scale.”

Dorrin’s array cost 340,000 to install, a figure Wenlock’s consulting group used as the basis for its since-shelved proposal to build a larger version at Sennett. Osafo has visited Dorrin twice to study its maintenance routine and said the comparison is not lost on her staff.

“We know exactly what the upside looks like. We can drive forty kilometres and see it running,” she said. “Knowing what you’re missing doesn’t get you the funding for it.”

Living around the schedule

Residents have built routines around the supply calendar. Amara Djiba, who has lived in Sennett’s northern sector for six years, times her cooking to the evening generator hours and keeps a jerrycan reserve against days when the water trucks run late.

“You learn the schedule the way you learn a bus timetable,” she said. “Tuesday, no lights until seven. Thursday, water comes twice.”

Not every household manages the schedule as smoothly. Djiba’s neighbour, Farouk Nassim, arrived at Sennett eighteen months ago from a smaller site that closed after its own funding ran out, and said the standpipe rotation took him weeks to learn.

“At the old site, water came whenever a truck happened to come,” he said. “Here there’s a system, and once you understand it, you can plan your day around it instead of your day being at the mercy of it. That’s an improvement, even if the amount of water is still not enough.”

Clinic staff say the schedule shapes their work too. Nurse Selin Vartan, who has run Sennett’s clinic for four years, said the clinic’s own generator allotment has to be negotiated separately from the residential schedule each time a procedure runs long.

“If I’m mid-procedure when the fuel allocation for the day runs out, that’s not something I can pause,” Vartan said. “We’ve built in a reserve for exactly that, but it’s a reserve, not a guarantee. Every emergency after dark is also a conversation with whoever is managing the generator that night.”

Sanitation follows its own separate, smaller logistics chain: a pit-emptying truck that visits each sector every ten days, a schedule residents say is the one part of camp life that runs later than promised more often than not. Djiba keeps a second jerrycan reserve specifically for the days the truck falls behind, on top of the one she keeps for water delivery delays.

The solar plan that hasn’t moved

Camp administrators have proposed a solar array modelled on Dorrin’s for Sennett, a plan that has circulated in coordination meetings for three years without securing the funding to break ground. Minutes from the Resettlement Coordination Office’s quarterly planning session, reviewed for this article, show the proposal listed as an agenda item across eleven consecutive meetings, each time marked “carried forward pending budget.”

Osafo said the maths were straightforward on paper. “A modest solar installation pays for itself against diesel costs in under four years,” she said. “The problem has never been the case for it. The problem is nobody has released the capital.”

The Resettlement Coordination Office, which oversees Sennett alongside two smaller sites in the Halven Basin including Dorrin, said in a statement that a funding request for the solar project was under review with regional authorities and that water rationing would be reassessed before the winter months, when road access to Keshen becomes less reliable. The statement did not address why a comparable project had been funded at the smaller Dorrin site while Sennett’s version remained carried forward.

Wenlock, who helped design both systems, said scale worked against Sennett in a way that had nothing to do with need. “Dorrin’s array was a manageable grant application because Dorrin is small,” she said. “Sennett needs something roughly five times the size, which means a grant application competing in the same funding round against every other line item in the region. The bigger the need, the harder it gets to fund in one piece.”

For now the schedule holds at Sennett: four trucks at dawn, diesel twice a week, lights at seven on the nights the generator runs long enough. Forty kilometres south, at Dorrin, the diesel truck is not due again for another six days.