Students to aid in water project
POTSDAM — Forty high school students from around the country will get a chance to help design a drinking water purification system for a small village in Ecuador this summer.
Clarkson University's chapter of Engineers Without Borders has been working on a system in La Margarita, Ecuador, for two years, and now younger students will get a crack at it.
"As the situation is now, they have no sanitary services. They pull their water right from the river," said Shane W. Rogers, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, who will be one of the program's three professors this summer. "The ideas that these students come up with are not likely to be things that we take right into the community. What I'm hoping for is fresh ideas."
Though the students will not actually go to Ecuador, they will brainstorm ways to sanitize the community's water and present their ideas to residents and university experts.
Though the high school students will have only a week to work on the problem, ideas that they come up with may be incorporated into the work the Engineers Without Borders do during the academic year. The program runs from July 11 to 17.
"They're not going to get any further than what we call the conceptual design phase," said William J. Vitek, philosophy professor and humanities and social sciences chairman. "They don't have enough time, they don't have enough engineering, they don't have enough knowledge."
Rather than coming up with a specific plan and design, the idea of the program is to bring students together to look at all aspects of a problem, including cultural differences as well as practical engineering and logistics, said Mr. Vitek, who was one of the program's founders approximately 18 years ago and is one of its professors.
Though Clarkson has been working with La Margarita for nearly two years, the government recently changed the entire project.
It recently paid for housing upgrades for the village's 350 residents — homes that were propped up on branches or wood pylons became concrete and mortar buildings with pipes and toilets, sinks and showers. However, without any kind of delivery or sanitation system, residents are still hauling river water up to storage tanks on their roofs.
"The wastewater situation hasn't changed," Mr. Rogers said. "Prior to this, the community practiced open defecation and open latrines and from time to time they collect that and burn it or the river will flood and wash that away."
"There's a definite cycle of disease," he said. "This is done upstream of them as well."
Before the government upgraded the homes, Clarkson students were considering using a purification system in which the river water is filtered using clay pots. Now that the villagers have the convenience of taps in their homes and storage containers on their roofs, it is less likely anyone will be willing to use the clay system, Mr. Rogers said.
"It's an intense week of creativity and of thinking," Mr. Vitek said. "It was designed to really challenge students to solve a problem in a week that was really too big to be solved in a week."
Before they arrive for their stay on campus, students will receive briefing packets to acquaint them with the task.
Though specific numbers were unavailable, many of the students who are accepted into the summer program enroll at Clarkson.
"Increasingly, more and more of them are already enrolled to come in the fall or strongly leaning toward coming to Clarkson," Mr. Vitek said. "At least half."
If they do enroll, they will have an opportunity to continue working on La Margarita's water problems with the Engineers Without Borders group, Mr. Rogers said.
"The hope is that we might be able to grow the program. It's a relatively new group at Clarkson," he said. "If we could find a technology that worked, then we could bring it to the other communities up and down the river that are underserved."
