Pure nostalgia. That’s how I felt when I looked through the photos on my computer of my trip to Honduras two years ago. I was reminded by a previous post about my experience with AguaClara, a Cornell project team that designs and builds water treatment plant for impoverished communities in Honduras. The team has grown in size and prestige ever since I left, and it’s garnered multiple awards (from the EPA and Katerva, most recently).

AguaClara began in 2005 as a course at Cornell University. Led by Professor Monroe Weber-Shirk, AguaClara became a project team in the College of Civil and Environmental Engineering. It provided students with the opportunity to apply their technical engineering knowledge to real-world problems–specifically, to water engineering.

As the only hotelie on the team in 2010, my role was a non-technical one. I worked with the Outreach Team to increase public awareness and visibility of AguaClara, hoping to obtain more corporate sponsors for the organization. But my job was far from the most interesting one. The civil and environmental engineers who designed the water treatment plants had come up with some truly innovate plans:

The team sought to (and successfully did) design water treatment plants that required no electricity, no filters, no valves, few moving parts, and low maintenance. If you were to tell an engineer in the United States that you’d be designing such a plant, they’d probably say you were crazy. But why are those restrictions necessary?

• Electricity: it’s very unreliable in rural communities, and many of them don’t have access to it. If electricity stops, then the treatment plant would stop. That’s no good.
• Filters: filters require a lot of maintenance and upkeep. They regularly need to be back-flushed (i.e., push pure water backward through the filter to clean it out), which requires time, energy, clean water, and a lot of technology.
• Valves/moving parts: AguaClara realizes that the treatment plants will be run by locals who don’t have experience with computers and mechanics. If a valve breaks, then you’d need to order a replacement from the United States and find how to fix it.

The premise of the whole low-maintenance design was this: if you build a simple, easy-to-operate facility, local communities will take ownership of their water supply and gladly take charge of the plant. There have been many instances in which outside organizations–all with good intentions–built complex water filtration plants in Honduras, only to have them break down and be abandoned. When locals aren’t trained to operate a plant (or worse yet, it requires someone else to operate it), then the community loses control of their water supply.

I’m continually impressed by the innovative work that AguaClara students do, and I’m delighted to see that other organizations are finally recognizing the value of it.