Engineers tap into spirit of help
PHILADELPHIA – Tony Sauder stood on a mountainside in a remote Honduran village, with 14 University of Pennsylvania students in tow, and opened his backpack. Bad news.
At some point during a bumpy ride in a pickup truck, he had broken his hand level, a vital tool for his group’s quest to bring fresh water from a mountain spring down to the community of 225 people. Now, it would be hard to plot the best course for the pipes that would carry the water downhill.
Not to worry. Class was in session, and this was the perfect lesson in problem-solving – the essence of engineering.
Sauder and group co-leader Linford Martin took 50 feet of rubber tube, filled it partway with water, and duct-taped plastic bottles to each end. By eyeing the water levels in each bottle, the students could calculate the slope of the terrain.
The engineers used the device gamely for most of the day, until a group of surveyors from the capital, Tegucigalpa, came to help, carrying the latest in laser levels.
“They were laughing at us,” said D.J. Wallman, a junior from Connecticut.
The rubber-tube device was more than just an amusing bit of gringo creativity. It was part of a project for Engineers Without Borders-USA, a group unaffiliated with Doctors Without Borders, but with similar humanitarian goals.
The goal in this case was to supply water – an increasingly scarce commodity and a source of strife throughout much of the world. More than one billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. More than two billion don’t have adequate sanitation, and several million die each year from waterborne disease.
In China, the Yellow River no longer reaches the sea. In Mexico, dozens of Mazahua Indian women stormed a treatment plant in 2004 to protest the removal of water from their land. In Bolivia, thousands took to the streets in 2000 after a public water system was privatized; one demonstrator was killed by an army sharpshooter.
There is no such unrest in the Honduran village of Terreritos – “little bit of earth.” Residents welcomed the Penn students, who started building a new water system last month.
Penn’s project is just one of 80 efforts under way in 44 nations. Engineers Without Borders has close to 200 professional and student chapters in the United States.
The students first cleared rocks and mud with pickaxes and shovels to expose a spring. Then they made a concrete box to collect the water that bubbled forth, and built concrete pillars to support pipe over the first, and deepest, ravine.
Students also helped dig trenches for the installation of white PVC pipe, though villagers are doing most of the digging. So far, pipe has been laid along the trickiest part, the initial two-thirds of a mile.
The residents of Terreritos hope to install the rest by this fall. Even then, the total water flow will be a relative trickle by U.S. standards, perhaps 11 gallons per minute.
Ellis Lanaux, a New Orleans resident who will be a junior next year, is more accustomed to an excess of water.
After Hurricane Katrina, his family had to replace the floors and the bottom six inches of walls in their house.
In Terreritos, he saw the other extreme. His host family left its outdoor faucet on all the time, collecting the intermittent water in a large metal drum for later use.
“These people have less than the poorest of the poorest people in the United States,” Lanaux says. “They’re not complaining.”
But they could use a little more water.