Prof. David Brandes: The World Water Crisis

so I'm up first or get your dose two of talk about water different scale different kind of an issue really and then later this hour this morning Diane all will talk about let's see it was da Vinci I know that beyond the Last Supper and maybe she'll touch on the fact that talking about connections here da Vinci was somebody who wrote extensively about water about the art of water he was fascinated with vortices and spirals and things like that that you see in water and turbulence he even proposed irrigation schemes for areas of Italy it didn't have water so certainly connections there maybe she'll talk about art or something else that you're probably going to have enough after I get through let me talk a little bit in the same way that drew did about you know who i am and kind of where I come from before we get into into this I'm a civil engineer by training but I've always been interested in in the water so you think of civil engineering you may think a lot of buildings and bridges and roads I've always been more in the in the water environmental side of civil engineering but along the way I've worked quite a bit with other types of scientists I when I was doing my PhD work my project was out in Los Alamos and I was actually in an environmental science group but we were interested in the transport of the radionuclides that have been strewn all over that Mesa top up there and buried here and there how they transport off the Mesa ok so that's a problem of environmental issues but also water and how it moves in the environment so I've always worked with these other types of people and so I've always been a little conflicted and maybe tour between you know what my identity really is ok there we go you know whether I'm a civil engineer or a scientist the hydrologist and really on some kind of combination of both and the neat thing is now and then you can blame problems on the civil engineers and pretend you're hydrologists and vice versa have to but certainly you know we don't have to answer the question you know what's a civil engineer doing talking about water we've been doing water since day one and in this country there's a asce American Society of Civil Engineers the people who started that we're working up on the Croton Aqueduct in New York City you all know have you heard of the Croton Aqueduct fine ok some people live right there right that was the first water system real water system to bring water into Manhattan and that was when this group got started now it's not the first time people not didn't call themselves maybe engineers at the time we're interested in moving water around that's been going on for thousands of years this is a picture i'm going to be there next week in segovia in spain where there's this this 2000 year old Pacwa duck it's been well preserved they have done work some work on it to keep it looking like this but certainly people you know for as long as we've been civilized have been interested in improving you know our our way of living and do that a lot of times you need to bring in more water you want to grow more crops you may like to live somewhere but there's just it's a nice climates good Southern California unfortunately there's not a lot of water there so you bring it in right so but you know through the interactions with other other professionals and a realization really in the last you know maybe just few decades maybe 50 years at most you know that the earth is this complicated interconnected system and civil engineers aren't going to do a good job of solving our problems if we're working alone okay now it's the hydrology is connected to as drew mentioned yesterday the ecology the weather it's all connected in a lot of times it's social issues and constraints that really matter in the end okay so and so thus see in fact they've had a hand in creating some those civil engineers all right has a had a hand in creating some of our own problems so see I can say the day now and then I am a member of asce and a licensed engineer and all that too okay um let's see what so III didn't I wasn't an educated in a place like a lafayette college I came in university of maryland penn state university big technical schools so i've been here for a little over ten years and what we pride ourselves on is this engineering in a liberal arts environment right which is very unique there are not many places like us it's something we should capitalize them and we do and so i'm still may be figuring out what that means but what I guess if I've known for anything on this campus it's that I have done my best to try to do real on the ground projects with my students that's the way I motivate them that's the way I make connections in the real world so I do a lot of that real community-based projects try to do project with real constraints real clients real money sometimes that's very difficult to do you know in a semester or a year but I try to make that happen and then to try to actually build something right that people get really excited about that not just engineers and you'll see later i'm working with lots of people who aren't engineers and the other thing that I always try to bring out in my classes no matter what they are is this idea of sustainability now maybe this is a catchword of of the day but you know I feel like this is a is a it's a principle that's been around forever and isn't going away we may call it something else in 20 years but sustainability is key and it's you know encoded at this point in our code of ethics is civil engineers so it's something we have to always have in mind and it sort of affects everything we do in some way I simic just a few pictures of what kinds of things I'm talking about well this is this is the freshman engineering class I wanted them to acne this is for weak blocks of time they rotate through civil chemical electrical engineer I wanted them to actually do something try and see how it works so what we did is we built these roofs on the back of aec over here a Koken engineering center collected rainwater tried to figure out how we could filter it avoid the pigeon poop that might show up the first time water runs off that roof so they had to sort of engineer it a little bit and then by the end of that unit see how many people would be willing to drink it no that didn't happen didn't happen very much I did have one or two students who did I didn't encourage it but point was they were actually doing something that they had to work right over here on the right we had a project up this stream with the bush skill stream Conservancy that I worked with quite a bit to go in and there was an existing detention basin they're the kind that gets mode a lot that has concrete channels in it and we went in and retrofitted that to look more like a naturalized basin and there's real reason scientifically that that's a better way to deal with with storm water because all those plants and things in there remove some of the volume okay typically your run water through these things and it runs out all the everything that comes in goes out this way you got water coming and going out but also some of its getting utilized in that system some people don't like those you know there might be snakes and ticks and other things in there you know if strike next to your house maybe you're not to think of a fan of it this is down in Honduras we I will talk about this project in the latter half of this presentation where we're installing water systems in small villages down down there and then on the right down here is a project right up here on College Hill where after the flooding which I will also talk about a few years ago there was an area of the neighborhood that really got ripped up and we went in there and working with the city and the stream Conservancy again we we actually built this constructed wetland now this this takes time it took about three or four years from start to finish to actually have that thing built in it but it's up there now and the neighborhood is really happy with the neighbors are real pleased with that quaint come out okay as far as what I do unlike drew I sort of bounced around a lot and it can create problems when people look at my file and also what are you an expert in mr. Brandes you know well I'm not sure but it all has to do with water usually water quantity sometimes quality just some of the things when I was my Master's work was on figuring out how to clean things out of aquifers groundwater that are similar to oil so we were trying to take some enhanced oil recovery methods and apply it to these things that like trichloroethylene it gets in the ground and you can't get it out when I did my PhD I was working on semi-arid systems i told you in New Mexico trying to model how the snowmelt hydrology work because we're interested in how these these radionuclides would transport off the Mesa tops since I've been here I've sort of you know sort of like curiosity base well i'm here what's going on around here that my students might be interested in I've kind of shifted focus more to what the streams around here are doing why are some of them more resistant to drought than others this is a big area that have been involved and how does urbanization and land development change the way our streams behave and of course that has implications to the kind of the biota that lives there and so on and so forth so we call it in particularly base flow that low-flow that like last week when it was so hot you know streams are really low that's the bit but they were still flowing most of them and that's the base flow that I'm talking about here we looked at some new methods for stream quality assessment using the kind of test kits that normal ordinary citizens would have there's lots of these watershed groups now some of you may belong to them they go out and sample how do we interpret that data in a better way that's what that was about and then with the recent flooding on the delaware i had a student that looked at how are these these big events that we've had going to change how we define where that hundred year flood plain is and that's a complicated question it has tremendous implications and then the last thing you know recently i've gotten into i've always been interested in in eagles and how I they fly certain ways in the mountains I got involved in modeling raptor migration as a fluid flow problem okay whatever it's really neat stuff we put these trackers on Golden Eagles they fly around we can see where they go come back to the malls what does a terrain like there it was a weather like and see if we can predict where they go why is this important well wind turbines are cropping up all over the place and people are worried about some of these birds most of them red-tailed Hawks we could probably stand you lose a few thousand of those they're all over the place right let's get on to the the meat of what I'm here to talk about when you hear about the world water crisis you're probably thinking about one of two things or maybe more one is that we have absolutely have this humanitarian crisis going on I've been going on for a while still going on billions of people don't have don't enjoy the kinds of things that we enjoy I get up this morning I take a shower I don't even think about whether it's going to be water coming down the line I don't think about you know brushing my teeth weather well what I men who are Doris I sure do but you know here it just doesn't even occur to me and these are the kinds of things that most of the world has to worry about and the statistics are staggering and really disturbing the other thing a lot of people think about is this idea oh well we might run out of water at some point gosh I will demonstrate that that isn't going to happen but the problem is you know is the water where we are in enough quantity I didn't assign any reading probably should have pointed this out in advance but some of you probably get National Geographic this is the April issue I'm sure time other magazines have done similar things this just points out it's the incredible number of different pieces of this crisis that there are and i'm not an expert in a whole lot of that stuff you know i have a good sense of things i have my own perspective on things and i can definitely talk about what we're doing around here about these issues this is what i would say is try and find a copy of this take another look at it of course it's National Geographic it's pictorial it's just it's excellent reading just incredibly good and it points out that this is an issue that's it's not about necessarily about science and technology it's also about policy in philosophy and in spirit and religion and just about anything you could think of is wrapped up in this sort of water crisis issue okay so what i thought i would do is talk about on a large scale the hydrology or the science of the issue of water scarcity why why do some areas repeatedly have water scarcity others don't how would that maybe we touched on this yesterday and this is something that has got its tentacles and just about any kind of science you can think of as house climate change going to affect this particularly we're going to talk about droughts and floods and then water quality I'm going to go into a little bit and more along the lines of what are some of the issues that we think we've licked this problem at least around here but the fact is we really have it yet I'm going to show you some examples of that and then hopefully I'll have a lot of time to talk about what we're doing around here to deal with some of these challenges okay a couple pictures here at some of you may or may not be familiar with this this is a very famous plot of real data of co2 in the atmosphere collected in on a mountaintop in Hawaii and it's going up I think we can all agree on that and on the right is a picture from Honduras showing a woman and little kids hauling water which is what a lot of them do okay with a lot of their time okay um oh yeah forgot I put this in this is my wife here in my two boys my wife is wonderful sounding board for me so I told her I had to do this talk and she said you're not going to use equations are you what do you mean I'm sure I'm going to use a few gotta have some and she said no I wouldn't go there and so I put this up here professor Hermann pause when he heard that unmistakable thud another brain had imploded so I won't do that today ironically enough my partner over here drew the geologist did put some up so what do you know we got them in here anyway in fact is you don't really need equations for a lot of this stuff that I'm going to talk about for example I like to use this picture in my freshman engineering class all right I don't think we need to write up the equations for this somebody didn't understand the concepts of mass balance or force balance it whatever you want everyone to call it so we don't always need equations do it you have to be careful saying things like that so let's start with this first main heading of hydrology and a subtitle here times are changing ok I'm going to start with this picture I assume that probably a lot of you have seen something like this maybe somewhere i heard of the water cycle hydrologic cycle this particular rendition of it is from the United States Geological Survey point is there's a certain amount of water on Earth pretty much affects the mountain has been for a long long time and it will be tremendous amount of that is in the ocean which is not very usable by us unless we apply to it lots of technology there's a lot of it in ice and snow and there's a lot of it in the ground and there's really fairly small amount of it in surface water and the even smaller amount in the atmosphere but for the most part this is the part that we're using we're using some of this and this feeds this so there are connected of course so we're not going to run out of water that's not going to be the issue if distributed evenly the amount of precipitation available is more than enough for all and I not I don't just mean more than enough it's a huge amount of water huge I'm just talking about the fresh water in this one percent we could sit here and drink that and drink that go to the bathroom every few minutes we'd never get through it all trouble is of course as you all know it's not distributed evenly and we're not distributed evenly and that's where you know issues of scarcity come from and that's that's the issue we're faced with so again I said we're going to look at the same things at least for a while at this big scale so this is a map of precipitation this is averages okay and I'm going to hit this point more than once averages don't really tell the story when you're talking to this story here we are of course we're lucky because we're in that green blob and the green here's some here's millimeters and inches i still think in inches probably because the way I was trained as an engineer we get 40 40 couple inches of rain here and you can see from the colors got lots of places get lots of rain but there aren't that many people living there and then lots of other places where lots of people live there isn't much rain and interestingly enough there's hardly any rain in a lot of places you don't think of it dry is there like way up north we don't see a lot of rain point is you can't just look at the supply side of this equation there's three things you look at supply demand and then the people demand I mean demand of nature and that's this next map here this is a map of the average aridity index now aridity index what we do is we take the amount I circled it there the amount of rainfall and we divide it by something that we call the potential evapotranspiration now how do we measure that well it's really not that difficult this is thing called an evaporation pan and it's about four feet across or in diameter probably don't think in tick marks do you be and this is about 10 inches and we have to do a few things to be careful what the wind patterns are and stuff around this but essentially think about this you put this out there you fill it up with some water and you monitor you can put a scale under it monitor it by weight you know you can you can put it what we call pressure transducer you can automate this so that you get automated data set back to your computer somewhere but this is going to evaporate right over time and of course you probably have right next to that so some kind of helps rainfall gauge over here so you know what's coming in you know what's going out and so you can actually determine what this what we call p et is and calculate this thing we call the aridity index so its supply / demand and it's more useful because it really tells us how much water is gets there and then hangs around for us to use right and so now we look at this and we see it a different map in some respects it's quite similar but what it shows is that there are lots of places that lots of people live where water scarcity is is what you would expect okay and you could argue well those are kind of risky places to live and then that's kind of thing hydrologists argue right the engineers say hey wait a minute we could fix that right we got to work together on this stuff I will I circled this why did I circle this tell you why you brought up thresholds yesterday remember that systems that are near thresholds can switch or rapidly than ones that are that's an area right there that's sub-saharan Africa West Africa right now there is tremendous famine going on there I mean go online look at the pictures that will blow you away you absolutely blow you away on the other hand is from a scientist view that's a spot with it a tremendous gradient of moisture right if one year for five years remember this is an average you might have lived there for ten years and hey it's always been nice and you know pretty wet we've always had enough rain something happens in the climate something shifts it's warmer over here weather patterns change a little bit all of a sudden you're up there instead of there right so there are places like that that's a threshold area there's other places that are very much like that it's not it's not the only example Southwest is not so much like that there are more broad bands of conditions right although with the mountains that you know where you are on a mountain slope you can really affect what things are like climatically okay so that's that's what we call a reddit e index and that's really telling us how much water is there under natural conditions to be utilized now you know I mentioned this in in words the only way we can live in places like that is through massive waterworks moving a lot of water around this is a picture does anybody wanna guess where that is so Google Earth images you can open but it's Las Vegas this is the edge of town right now you can see it ain't going to be the edge of town in fact about these images are always a few years old right it may not be the edge of town anymore it's a desert is a desert out there it's a place that's going to struggle tremendously with water for its future existence and it's got problems already we talked about water level of Lake Mead being way down the water is more saline than it used to be has more salts that has implications to reuse if you take water and treat it and put it back and reuse it the salinity tends to keep going up so it's not it's not an easy problem to deal with ok what's next ok so I also plotted gave you the broad statistic that thirty percent of population lives in these areas arid and semi-arid just a map of cities of more than a million people this is 06 and I've been pretty bad about labeling on here where I got everything and so my students would just have a heyday with me because i always get on them about this course she's back there recording it so hope I don't get fired Middle East American Southwest their areas in Australia where we have big cities that this isn't any water western India Pakistan same issues parts of China are like this so you know we've set ourselves up for a lot of conflict in trouble im global drought monitor you can go online and see this is at University College London they have these great maps this is base there's different ways to do this calculation this is based on something called the Palmer drought severity index and it's a particular way of looking at the rainfall and how much evaporation has occurred and so on let's not get into that but this is showing you currently well this is labeled july two thousand ten throughout condition different parts of the world it's exceptional is over whoops sorry wrong button exceptional that darker red and down here it says population in the current view under exceptional drought 246 million people and this is this area i was talking about here drew you're going to go up to camp soon right hopefully they'll be water in your lake up there you it's downright so we have neat ways of mapping all this stuff now what was that next slide oh so i mentioned earlier we do a lot of work in honduras right and i will talk more about that currently they're very close to areas that are very dry we're still we work right about near where that x is there in its we're okay right now but we're a lot of places around us they're struggling with with drought conditions right now and in this you know it's not that drought is unusual is what i'm going to point out you there's always drought somewhere and we're always struggling with this now at the other end of the spectrum we can look at flooding and if you want to know about what's going on in the world and flooding you don't go to university college london yet you go to Dartmouth I don't know why but that's where you go they have this really cool global flood mapping that they do this is just for what last week I pull this one up now you may have seen in the news of tremendous flooding going on in Monterey and Mexico in places like that and I think the numbers just mean the number the incidents in this given year I'm not exactly sure and this is a map of reported floods throughout the first half of 2010 and things start lighting up a lot more right point in floods and droughts are sort of in a sense normal what we have up here though is interesting and it's going to lead us into this issue of change according to them they've been tracking this now since the mid-80s and you always wonder if somehow the methods or the data has gotten better but they show both sort of moderate floods and bigger floods and I forget exactly what m 4 and 6 means in this context both of them are going up the incidence of these a number of occurrences of these size types of flood are going up which isn't really interesting and probably related to this ok now you can talk about flood damages going up that's a little bit different right flood damages relate to how many people how much infrastructure are there when that flood comes through actual incidences of floods probably related something going on in the quote the natural world the climate so I put this up earlier right this is that plot very famous plot back to the late 50s of measurement actual measurements and of co2 in the atmosphere and you can see that there's this up and down and that signal relates to growth of plants notice of our lands in northern hemisphere the plants are growing taking up co2 in the winter co2 goes up so but the trend is up right and looking at actual data now I'm not going to get into modeling because I'm not a climate change expert a model atmospheric modeler this is just data we're looking at same time period i shaded over there global average temperatures and this includes both i believe both sea surface temperatures and ground-based temperatures they people who do this work always talk in terms of anomalies okay the difference from the mean okay so 0 is the mean difference from the mean so it's positive that means it's warmer than average it's going up right it's going up this curve kind of looks a bit like that curve they're probably interrelated you ever hear of Occam's razor the simplest explanation is probably the right one it isn't always but it's probably and I suspect those are certainly connected we think they are that's pretty well-established question is how does this affect water crisis and what's going on with the water that's a really interesting question there are certain things that are unequivocal and that is the fact that all that water that we had stored in ice and snow feeding those melt water streams that drew showed us yesterday if that's disappearing long-term we know a lot of places they are disappearing that has huge implications to people and their ability to do to get water just some examples so so the Himalayas these are some big river systems in the home Himalayas and how many people live there depend on on that water I in this 180 million Ganges 400 million brahmaputra Yangtze going over eastward into China in the Andes there are cities Ecuador Peru Bolivia that's where the water comes from and of course in our own country in the southwest the Colorado River and other rivers like the Platte if all that snow and all that ice disappears this isn't going to happen overnight by any means and and these you know about the Intergovernmental Panel for climate change a lot of scientists working together under auspices of un came out they come out with reports in 2007 they got in every port that I think was I the Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 okay they caught a lot of flack for that because that's crazy the real numbers 2350 okay now they claims a typo I've done things pretty bad like that I can see where that could be a typo but of course so point is it's not going to happen by 2035 but hopefully we're all going to be around and our children's children's children will be around when it may be is going to happen so looking at huge changes down the line that's how many 300 plus years away engineers don't think a lot about that geologists don't even either because they're thinking in millions and hundreds of thousands but we got to think in those timescales too okay that's going to happen but it I wouldn't say it's a crisis right now so the question is more what's the shorter term impacts on water scarcity not just scarcely because floods is a big issue 2 and is like this where i live here in Pennsylvania I don't know sure there's a wide distribution of places that you all come from and things that you touch every day but the thought the general thought for many scientists and it certainly makes sense from perspective of physics is that there's going to be more moisture in the atmosphere it's a warmer atmosphere got operate more and it's going to rain more in other places right it's going to be a more active system and around places like this we're going to feel this probably and it's going to be felt in extremes that's the thought well these effects will be felt locally in extremes wet areas will tend to get wetter because warmer more moisture more rain more intense storms dry areas get drier more drought and there this is becoming pretty much everybody of repute that has studied this I put one um one citation here from nature a few years ago that this is based on but that's not nearly the only study there's lots of studies and this is what we think the direction is now I put in yellow here though and this has come up a lot of my own work natural variability and whether coupled with large Gil anthropogenic effects things like land is changing because we use it differently populations moving water projects are moving water around it's hard to find these effects against all that big noise it's hard to see that perhaps these effects of climate change to be able to pin things down and understand oh that's happening because of climate change that's a difficult thing to do I will give you a simple example one of the things I've been interested in is since i came to the Lehigh Valley how long stream flows changed due to suburbanization of the Lehigh Valley over the past 50 years now the Lehigh Valley basically goes from phils berg easton area over here to Allentown this is again an aerial view all the stuff that looks gray is lots of houses and so a lot of this has cropped up within not just the last 50 years but say the last 30 years right and the real nice situation here for hydrologist is that we've got pretty good data sets right around here this is the Lehigh Valley Airport almost any Airport that's of any size has it has a weather station because of course you're concerned about flights coming in and now got good data on whether going back 50 years the other dots are where we have gauges on the streams and USGS is the people who go through those and those also go back 50 or more years there's two here on the Lehigh down in Easton at Glendon in pent-up and near that other school starts with L up there that's right there and those other three dots are smaller watersheds drew I had a picture of a watershed the land area that drains into a certain stream or river so these other three are on local watersheds I thought wow this is great i'm going to get a few students will crank through some of this data and we'll see what's happening we'll look at trends and look at the precipitation and so on and so forth well here's the problem weather is highly variable not just a little bit highly variable when somebody says all the average temperature for today is 86 yeah well so what what's the range of variation what's sort of how often those at 96 instead of 86 so when their variability huge dams well I found out real quick that that gauge is right below the chain down on the Lehigh River basically can't use it the water flow past that gauge is highly influenced by the fact that there's a big dam there there's also other dams farther upstream so it kind of affects how we look at these other ones data because this one was I forget when Fe Walter was built but it's a flood control man so the flooding has changed significantly these other ones we didn't have those kinds of problems about what I did find is that there's a lot of you know people live there equate that with a lot of artificial movement of water okay piping systems leaking water piping systems moving water from one watershed to another big Nestle plant here pumping water out pot putting it in bottles like this one moving water around and that's hard for me to account for if I'm looking at rainfall and evaporation and stream flow so this became much more complicated than I thought and which you know in our practical little academic world much more difficult to publish than I thought but it was very instructive for for me and for my students and so we got a lot out of it i will show you one example of the actual data this is the little Lehigh creek near allentown it's west of Allentown just on the other side of em and it's remarkable this is a remarkable data set this is the peak streamflow every year now this isn't big feet per second it's a measure of volume per time so it's the peak of when that flood wave came through it was the maximum volume of water going past there in a second right that's that number the number that's plotted and for every year we figure out what was the peak event right well things look pretty nice and sort of things are going along at some sort of normal way from the beginning to around 1970 and then all of a sudden what we see is number one the mean seems to have jumped up by at least a factor of 2 and the variabilities gone all the hell right well this is interesting from a water managers point of view because everything we do is predicated on sort of these these things like what's the 25-year storm what's 100-year storm right well with all of a sudden what's the head of your flood if I'm here a flood plain anybody live on a river near a river okay you make care you know we're really is that flood plain because of course you got to buy insurance perhaps and you might get flooded out more often than not but we're in charge of predicting where that line is if all of a sudden 100-year flood went you know from somewhere here to somewhere there that has huge implications that people in the world in politicians oh crap i'm going to tell those all those people down there they can't live there anymore you know so really interesting data set and the only explanation is the climate around here there was a lot of drought right in here and then it got wet and it stayed wet for a while and on top of that we had a lot of people moving in building going on land development so um really kind of interesting story okay this is again real data i'm not going to show you any model predictions of anything what's happening to temperature well red is going up blue is going down it's either in a few places not changing or everywhere else that's going on okay it's going up and where is it going up the most down there oh trouble right it's a dry area to begin with on the right changes in precipitation right it's almost all green and blue now some places in the West I don't like the color scheme so much it is it's precipitation rates are going down which is sort of the trend that you whoops I'm sorry would expect to see so real data things seem to be changing in the ways that we would expect them to with climate change of course variability you know I'm doing this gardening project and I'll show you that too is up here up by Metzger field and you drove up there you see this big garden kind of rough looking and spots a little bit weedy now and then last year we have we put in this water system we never hardly used the thing last year because it just rained and rained and rained and it was cool and damp last year that way true for a lot of the country this summer different we've already run out of water up there once and that was last week plus yeah last Tuesday boy it was out a scorcher time here was 245 p.m. and you see you know what kind of cyst conditions were dealing with that's temperatures that's from the weather channel the thing down here is applauded from the United States Geological Survey it's again a color-coded map every one of those dots is where we have a stream gauge on a creek on a river on a reservoir surface water anything black or blue is experiencing you know near flood close to flood conditions right very high for this time of year for that day of the year lotta flow right greens sort of average conditions Red's very low okay and you can see what conditions were like as of last week now that got moderated a little bit we had quite a bit of rain here actually on Sunday morning was it but the streams went down really quickly and the reason they did that is because it was so dry a lot of that water just got sucked up by the ground and in the summer when the water gets too sucked up by the ground it's going to go to the plant it's not going to go much back to the stream the plants are going to use a lot of that water so tremendous a lot of drought through this region a lot of things happening in the Upper Mississippi it some seems to be wet there a lot these days okay now some parts of the world a few are really taking this an issue of climate change has changed our water system very seriously in Southeast Australia there's an area called the murray-darling basin and it's it's a large mostly semi-arid basin lots of water projects aqueducts damn so it's heavily controlled there's hydropower there this is the average long-term inflows into that system monthly inflows what's a GL billion litres maybe I'm not sure point though is this is the general trend now goat why does it go up in july august and sep tember it's their winter i a'n't this the Austral winner okay so that's well the winners here that's the snow melt season right so that's the inflow of all the snow that's is the average then it dropped and then you know it's just annual cycle that's an average now the last number of years and this has been going on for about 10 years and moderated a little bit this past year but it's enough that the people have decided we can't wait around and hope that it changes we've got to make changes in the way we use and manage water these are the inflows for these other years here the red line so it's incomplete 2009-10 yellow is a year before this is a year before Black is 06 07 I mean those people are looking at serious serious drought in looking at graphs is one thing pictures talking to farmers is another mean a lot of people sheep farmers that area given up but what they had that they had to do is they've instituted water rationing and it's based really on what the immediate security needs of the country are so drinking waters number one always takes precedence but so irrigations below that there's been cuts in those rations okay we have done anything yet like that in this country cuts to the rations to the farmers they've done that one of the farmers done well if they're still farming they have changed the way they irrigate big time they've gone to more expensive more technically involved systems of drip irrigation actually monitoring in real time what their their land is now dry it is but it can be done and restrictions on personal use can't water your lawn and can't fill your swimming pool lots of things like that come into play in the murray-darling and that has happened just in the last few years now that's in the murray-darling well what about here more flooding is what we think we might see right do we care well we sure do around here don't we since we've invested a lot of money down there at the bottom of the hill right this pictures from 2005 that's the visual arts building now we are going to have a nice film and Media Studies Center down there too I talked to my buddy Andy who's the department had just said I know I can't put anything valuable on the first floor I know who I know this is the chamois shine car wash I don't know if you've seen that it's just a little bit down of here okay with people canoeing through there you don't see that every day this picture this is 2005 I put up this is three different years I put up here 2005-2006 2004 that hasn't happened very often around here that's that the thing is no no no none of these are really anywhere close to that these are big floods in fact two of them are about 100 year floods one of them's maybe a fifth-year consecutively that's what's most interesting right certainly got a lot of people's attention yeah yeah that's a whole talk fact i dint I I thought about giving that talk instead but I thought this would appeal to more people it relates to it's just horrible terminology it's insurance terminology it what a hundred year flood means is that there's a one-percent chance of it happening this this year okay so if you think one over one percent you get 100 and so people think oh well if there's one percent chance of happening this year that means it probably happens about once every 100 years totally wrong totally wrong that's not at all true random systems don't face themselves evenly ever okay so just really bad terminology but that's what we're working with and thank you if I I probably say things up here you have no idea what I'm talking about please stop me because there's the rest of you own you're probably in the same boat um oh did I get yeah so just where is this hundred year flood plain well if we can figure out what the hundred year flood as we can maybe map this flood plain right you know the whole concept of the hundreds of other place is a weird one because there's nothing particularly different about the hundred year than the two hundred years in the 75 year we just happened to pick that one okay and if there's 100 year flood there is a two hundred year flood which is bigger than fun right there's nothing magical about that unfortunately so this is the actual data so somebody's question this is the hurricane Diane North 1955 that was a huge one in if how are we doing on time what am i stopping 10 all right I have a nine minute movie i'm going to show you i should probably pick up the pace a little bit but there's the data these are the three big floods of four five and six it's definitely highly unusual there be the biggest 6 on the map right here since 1904 now as it turns out a little bit before this there were three big floods before the gauge was put in people marked and particularly in trenton remarks three consecutive years really big it's how are you that floating down well that's it that's a good question see this thing i put up here these are signs you see all along the river governor stop the delaware river flooding you can't prevent it you can learn to live with it better you can flood proof ok you can flood proof your home you know in some places there actually have moved neighborhoods bought people out and said this is not a good place to build let's make it into open space the problem it let's let's watch the movies i think it will help directly with that question just one more point before i go to that drew and i have gotten involved with a local NGO that's interested in this very issue and this issue of flooding and how can we better help people understand the real risks and what's involved in the fact that you know there are limits to the amount of control a lot of people talk silently came up yesterday right you started hearing you a little bit of hue and cry for maybe we should have put talks island in right thing is there's flood control reservoirs on the Lehigh right the Lehigh flooded a lot of times the same same as this one maybe not as much but it doesn't prevent floods and sometimes what it does is it gives people a false sense of security and people start moving into places where they shouldn't so preventing is probably not what we can do well g 00 non-government organizations nonprofit so this movie that I'm going to thrill us a nine minute clip it was put together by a guy who's working with them he's a flood safety guy but it's about I tried to embed it in the every time I try to embed something in the PowerPoint it doesn't work so I just let's look at it this way can you see that yeah I might have to crank up the volume here high as I can put it the utility of these waterways help the state become a manufacturing powerhouse churning out the coal and steel that fueled the engines of America's industrial age but with so many cities built right down on the water's edge it's no wonder that this area has suffered from so many devastating floods and over time Pennsylvania has tallied the greatest amount of flood damages for any non coastal stain the first big flood event and arguably one of the worst natural disasters in all american history was the Great johnstown flood of 1889 Johnstown was a bustling steel town and like so many others in that industrial era its mills were built right on the river to transport materials and get rid of waste the city already had a major flood problem since it's situated at the bottom of a narrow canyon but the mill owners and townspeople had become increasingly vulnerable to a poorly maintained earthen dam just 14 miles upstream from the city and then it began to rain hard they lose generally assume that that dams gonna break some day but the tragedy was known to what the consequence were being dead 2209 men women and children and perish in the flood the biggest single-day civilian loss of life in American history till 911 a closer look at the topography around Pennsylvania shows elements that contribute to the chances for heavy rainfall and flooding the first is the states of under ability to large air masses moving in from the Great Lakes or the Atlantic coast which can deliver hurricanes inland second on its western flank Pennsylvania is subject to storms moving up the Ohio River Valley and being stalled by the Appalachian plateau and lastly it sits at an overall latitude where large storm systems are likely to develop and stall and this is what happened in 1936 when a series of late winter storms brought wide-scale disaster throughout the entire region and practically all the major urban centers in Pennsylvania were hit hard american suffering it major plot to that here Johnstown was again devastating downtown and killing a dozen people Pittsburgh had 21 feet of water in the business district and fires threatened major portions of the city 45 people died there harrisburg is flooded and major transportation lines ground to home and in Easton rivers of ice water flowed past and through houses built right by the Delaware River in 1955 hurricanes Connie and Diane hit the northeast just five days apart this brought up to 17 inches of rain and major flooding in the Delaware River Basin 99 people died in that valley alone with many more deaths throughout the area in stroudsburg broadhead Creek cut the city into collapsing dozens of bridges and many small dams and in Easton the grade span that has survived the big floods of 1903 36 and 42 was ruptured by the remains of an old covered bridge that came crashing down the river in the darkness of night and then in 1972 Hurricane Agnes made its way up the East Coast and brought torrential rains to the Pennsylvania interior wilkes-barre was hit particularly hard and downstream on the Susquehanna Harrisburg and even the governor's mansion were inundated this event killed 48 people destroyed 68,000 homes and 3000 businesses and left 220,000 pennsylvanians homeless this recent history firmly establishes Pennsylvania's flood vulnerability but it also raises questions about how so many areas that have been protected might still be a great risk back in Johnstown this issue was addressed by mother nature with a violent thunderstorm in the summer of nineteen seventy-seven that brought floodwaters raging through Johnstown yet again in all 78 people died in the Johnstown area and the city song major devastation for the third time in 88 years what's important to note here is that much of Pennsylvania and the nation has been built to withstand the so called 100-year flood but we're seeing signs that some areas are likely to experience damaging floods on a much more frequent basis and climate scientists are telling us that large damaging floods may be occurring more frequently and with greater intensity in eastern for example in 2004 Hurricane Ivan brought another 100 year flood disaster to a city already hit by five major floods in the previous 100-year period but just six months later a flood that large came again in 2005 and then astoundingly a third time in June of 2006 this made 43 100-year floods in less than an two year period and obviously signals that more must be done to prepare Easton and the rest of Pennsylvania for floods to come up with recent flood disasters in New Orleans in the Midwest America appears to be waking up to assumptions about man-made protection from floods must always be questioned and all throughout the nation cities and citizens must do more to prevent and prepare for damaging floods in Austin Texas this building was severely damaged by a previous flood but the new owner made several improvements to help flood proof destruction the first floor was wrapped with a waterproof membrane and the entryway and electrical systems were elevated a few years later when another flood devastated businesses on either side this building stay dry in Las Vegas where flash floods threaten grade school classrooms study how floods develop and what to do to avoid being caught by one and in Tulsa Oklahoma whole neighborhoods that saw repeat flood events have been removed from flood plains to revive welcome open space and parklands and so Pennsylvania with many large cities and hundreds of communities at risk from damaging floods has a great challenge before it for along with our success of preventing the more frequent smaller floods one simple truth remains in town that has had a large damaging flood it's likely to have one again today the bills are largely gone and the rivers are a great source of recreation for all ages but there is still lady at risk from the river spell and there's more work ahead to create communities living in true harmony with nature okay so remember this is you know produced for the purpose of trying to educate you know let me get back to the slide educate the local community about more about you know what the risks really are and what can be done about it we probably need to keep moving but is there any real burning question that we want to talk about the move from the movie okay good okay let's move to water use and in the main point I want to make here is that when we talk about water all of the things the big challenges that we face globally turns out they're all interconnected can't really solve one without thinking about the others so in the US I'll show you some graphic for the global as well most of the water we use goes to agriculture and most of that to irrigation and close close to that is power generation believe it or not okay power generation most of these systems run steam turbines right that's how we generate electrical power lose a lot of water due to evaporation that we don't recover public water systems pretty big user in other industries 5% you look at the top what are using states California Texas Florida not too surprising Idaho Idaho why is that irrigation huge irrigation going on up there as well as power yeah and dams are considered consumptive hydropower is considered consumptive because if you need a certain amount of water to run your turbines that water can't be located to somebody else right so even though the water goes through it it's still allocated yeah the power generation number it's so you're that includes hydrogen redux which it doesn't remove water from system you're right so that that made me a bit deceiving right good point worldwide much more towards irrigation okay in why irrigation well look at these pictures again I'm not an expert on agriculture but these two pictures believe it or not in Arizona right okay I don't think they're that particular farmer is too worried about conserving water he's got a certain allocation and he's using it right in the murray-darling the allocations went down and my guess is a lot of farmers will figure out another way furrow method he has shown here flooding actually this is we they'll flood the entire filled with water we see a lot of this in the east these pivot systems big they go slowly around the field they're high pressure they're actually much better in terms of water Houston either of these but still a lot of wasted water the best system that we know about is in this picture is I believe from the India maybe it's from the third world I know that is a drip system these are the little dripper here and then you can actually combine that with actual real time soil moisture monitoring and really do a really excellent job of reducing water use tremendously it's possible it's more complicated new equipments involves it would have to be some capital investment for these farmers to do this but we can do that unfortunately it the history is that a lot of ground water has been used for irrigation and when you use ground water and this is something we didn't understand well until maybe you know the last few decades of 50 years maybe Rhea may be understood and didn't didn't matter is that you've got to be careful how much you take out of the ground because if you think too much you're basically mining it it's essentially fossil water because it's not fair of a very very long time scales it got its not quite fossil timescale that's the term people like to use two examples this is in the Santa Clara Valley this is now Silicon Valley used to be all orchards a lot of beautiful orchard land this is a plot of the depth of water and I think it's just one particular well down there in Mount San Jose water going from near ground surface fact this area had a lot of what's determine Saskatchewan fluff or Cartesian you this area had a lot of artesian wells it started up near zero down to 240 feet in the 60s what saved them well water you water switched to surface systems from other places that were brought in and as you know there are more profitable things to do in San Jose then grow oranges these days right this is the ogallala aquifer which is Western Great Plains that's a semi arid area Western Great Plains a lot of water use from that alkyl fer it isn't going to get back there anytime soon so these are reductions in water levels since 1950 declined more than 150 feet 50 to 150 feet so a lot of places have used that groundwater where there's a lot of it down there unfortunately once you use it a lot of places it's not going to come back very quickly at least not on the timescales we're interested in virtual water this is a really interesting concept and one that I wasn't aware ever really had thought very deeply about until recently virtual waters so it's or terminology the amount of water that is needed for production of food or other products and we think about what we eat not in terms of water usually right but as it turns out probably the worst thing you can do is eat a steak every day in terms of water because the amount of water trace it back through the life cycle that goes into production of beef is huge a lot of that through irrigation so the way we eat affects water where that water how much water where it's coming from some things you know that hasn't stopped me from having a steak now and then but I you know I try to eat more chicken and fish and other things because partly because of this kind of health you too so this is really an interesting concept people have mapped based on commodity grain beef and stuff these water this sort of water cycle around the world this comes I believe there's represent this is from National Geographic to I think and and we're primarily an exporter we use a lot of our own products but we primarily an exporter of this sort of agricultural virtual water amazingly Africa is an exporter a virtual water can you believe that some places like Japan Italy import huge amounts of this virtual water through through food through consumption so it's a whole new idea that you know a lot of us wouldn't think in these terms is quite interesting the way these things are interconnected okay ah this this energy production you know as I said this is thermoelectric a lot of this right and again hydro is sort of a unique one but fossil fuel nuclear those are thermoelectric steam steam generation are steam turbines really high water youth okay very high a lot of that water evaporates it's lost on the other hand photovoltaic panels on your roof when they don't use much water I tried to find numbers what I found is everybody has different numbers so I said well let's just go with you know the sort of qualitative scale and it biofuels one of the problems with biofuels you may have read some of this is a controversy about ethanol and it's sort of energy content is one one issue but it's a huge user of water because of the corn that has to be grown boy it's interesting how now I've talked about food and energy all of a sudden isn't it in this oh yeah why don't we require the power utilities to condense and reuse that water less energy to reheat it yeah operating costs i think a lot a lot of it is evaporating david rabbitt of cooling towers they have to return it back to thanks and well were there ever a lot of it goes back to the river a river yeah Rose the fish bigger though any sort of a royal or operation over the course of the use of the scheme to continue to concentrate salts in the in the circulating loops or the boilers so there's a certain fraction that has to be taken out periodically and that's referred to as boiler blowdown yeah so you have to remove so much just to maintain the system so that it doesn't foul that's one of the major reasons why you can't continue to reuse it I just wanted to bring this up in our area all of a sudden we're facing this issue nobody ever heard of a few years ago the marcellus shale gas large area of Pennsylvania New York Ohio West Virginia we've known it's down there for a long time now we have the technology to get at it with the horizontal wells and there's this what's called fracking they go in there under high pressure and inject chemicals into the formation to create a lot of micro fractures so we can get the gas out this uses a lot of water from whatever the local source is it produces a lot of waste water you get some of these fracking fluids have chemical now I'm talking water quality all of a sudden have chemicals so you know connected with energy now we're we're dealing with water again there's thousands of these wells just in Pennsylvania alone I had a student look map some of this hundreds of those are near our high quality streams and our TV streams which is exceptional value so it's a great economic boom for a lot of areas lots of potential for farmers and people ordinary people to make a little money on the side to keep their operation going there's also a lot of potential for water resource damage a few realistic solutions here well I've already mentioned irrigation we know we can do better it's going to take be there to be some pain involved cost but that can be done you know this again this is tied to energy now I don't I'm not a believer that we're there yet for this alternative we can't we don't have that much technology and that much capacity to do to produce the kind of energy we use with alternatives yet but hopefully we'll get there reclaimed water some places are already doing this treating wastewater blending it back into the potable water supply or using it for irrigation or actually just recharging the ground with it and we're going to have to do more of this particularly if the climate you know these risky areas just do their natural conditions if climate shifts to drier conditions you're going to see more of this thankfully for people like us who got means we can do that people always ask me about what what about desalination guess what this is connected to energy yeah we can do it and people with the means the Middle East huge desalination plants and they even do some of it by distillation which takes tremendous amounts of energy but they've got it right now and so it's okay we're doing it in Florida this is a Tampa this is the biggest as far as I'm aware the biggest desal plant in our country notice where it's located it's co-located with that fossil fuel coal fired power plant why because it uses so much energy and in fact they are using cooling water from there to feed this plant so there are reasons to tacola co-locate these things but they will use huge amounts of energy so we can do it if we have to it's got its downsides it's not going to help a lot of the world deal with their problems and it's it's expensive and of course operating costs are going to be directly to tie to energy costs water quality I don't have too much time to spend on this but the point I want to make is is that there are new challenges that we're not done yet we started out here anybody hear of dawn snow this is an epidemiologist working in London looking at the incidence of cholera at the time people thought cholera came from bad air somehow that was the leading theory and snow made this plot very his plot each one of these little dark bars is in his incident or maybe ten incidences of cholera I can't remember and map where the pumps are they of course everybody there was these you know Manuel pumps and went got your water this is broad street in london that's a pump there these other ones circled in blue are also pumps and what he did in what we like to call the engineers the first act of environmental engineering of all time he removed the handle of that pump and the problem went away in that area and so that was he was very clever guy looking at patterns and figuring out what was going on he's an epidemiologist not an engineer but so we know that water water and disease are linked and you know that that statistic I had earlier 9,000 children a day I mean most of that's waterborne disease so we we've come a long way since then go down north is that 125 years to the Clean Water Act this was the goal the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters will be eliminated by 1985 and we haven't done that I think the people who wrote this maybe didn't really understand what they were up against well that's right this is a very good point that's right that's the goal we don't know how far we're going to get but that's a goal some of you probably saw and I'm going to just point out a few examples from this series that ran in New York Times the last over the last year toxic waters really nice series they highlighted a few of the issues and that's what I'm going to do we have a system of aging sewers 50 hundred-year-old sewers most of our cities that work intended to the state last forever they all leak furthermore a lot of the systems are what we call combined sewers so for example most of the big cities on the East Coaster like this you have a sewer system and then the storm drains like when it rains it goes down those drains are connected into the sewer system right so as long as it's not raining hard the sewers can handle that flow it not a big deal but what happens when tons of it we had five inches the other day at the airport incredible that was over like three hours well all that water is going to go to the capacity that sewer to carry that water it's not going to work and so these things have these sort of like a flapper valve that opens up use enough pressure and releases all that water out into the harbor okay untreated water sewer make sewage mixed with the runoff from the streets that happens all the time the wet water condition any time you had a big storm if you're out sailing in the harbor I don't have a sailboat but I did I wouldn't jump off the boat you know not not in wet weather conditions so we have that issue and that's a lot of money to fix that recently there's been the courts have challenges the idea that that this Clean Water Act applies only to navigable water well it's always had been the case that anything connected to navigable water could be a very small stream or wetland was part of the navigable water now apparently there's been a few cases where that's been thrown out these Ducks are at avondale Creek and Alabama Court ruled the waterway was exempt from the Clean Water Act okay now this is we're going backwards here right I mean I've got two little boys I don't want them playing in that Creek anymore so they actually enforcement cases are down in recent years now you know I eat we can argue philosophy but what's the right way to make to have clean streams and whether it's a command and control kind of approach or not but you know I kind of favor strong regulations on things like clean water we got a lot of low low levels of pesticides in our groundwater atrazine anybody ever heard of atrazine it's you used herbicide commonly used on lawns certainly in the Corn Belt lots of it so there's lots of actors een in water at very low concentrations there it's it's controversial whether or not that's a problem I don't think we really know I like the precautionary principle I would rather not have it in water that I'm drinking because I don't know what it might happen to me right so that's still there here's a really great picture this is from National Geographic this is a rendition of a fish farm okay these are pharmaceutical chemicals personal care product type chemicals found in a particular waterway near Chicago you know we all use pharmaceuticals every day you will throw some out maybe flush them down the toilet we excrete them I mean we can't stop excreting them right but they are in our water there was an interesting study a couple years ago of pharmaceuticals in drinking water okay tested positive even though Easton's on the map Philadelphia had 56 different drugs found in its water now these are very very low concentrations right parts per trillion or something but you know if you got this Plus this Plus this Plus this and I drink it all my life well I don't know about that right now you know why some people say well I'd rather take my chances with this right where does that come from that might come out of a tap in Philadelphia fortune hopefully there's morality all right ya ready showed that interesting huh we have good woods Seattle place to go and it's pretty wet there right okay well I've got 15 minutes left I would hoped would get through maybe I have too many slides I always do that right tackling a global problem with local solutions now given now I understood that locally we don't face the kind of problems at some places so what we do here to conserve water isn't going to help the people in sub-saharan Africa too much right I understand that but I think we have to we have to lead by example okay where do I start well in 2007 this group came out nobody had ever heard of them they rated colleges on sustainability and they had eight or ten categories the what do we invest our endowment in you know what what's administration like what are the students doing energy what have we done on campus for alternative it oh you had eight or ten categories we got a d-plus now that other school up the road got a deep plus two so not that we ever want to be on the same level as them but I brought this to the attention of the grounds and built trustee committee on grounds and buildings that the time I happen to be representing the faculty on and I don't I can't claim to have been you know been the one who instigated all the changes happening around here but it got a tenth of people's attention to me because it's bad publicity and bad the perception is reality in the world we live it and furthermore there were a lot of things we could do that we weren't doing so the following year our president who talked yesterday signed a climate commitment that many university presidents have signed it actually commits us to quite a few really concrete steps to to try to reduce its related to climate change and reducing carbon emissions mostly but it says we exercise leadership and communities provide students with knowledge and skills needed to address the critical systemic challenges faced by the world in this new century I like that because as I've showed well this stuff is interconnected you can't going to solve one problem then okay we lick that let's do the next anybody know what that graph is over there that's the Dow Jones Industrial Average 'as red line is January of 2008 so we've been working with you know shorthand especially the year to just following that nonetheless we've done some pretty neat things campus master plan came out the next net last year it says some very specific things the college will start to look in where does fly some of its water needs by collecting rainwater for reuse and buildings and irrigation laughs it will also reduce potable water demand through conservation reuse and recycling that's the map of the what campus may look like down the line we also came out with an energy policy that talked about water so I don't know if they anticipate this connection between water and energy but it does cover some things use of irrigation water shall be minimized through rainfall monitoring now I haven't taken that picture at the heat of the heat last week so we we still have a way to go this is a sprinkler head that rotates around and it waters the sidewalk over there and it goes through this and it waters the pavement over there so it's not ideal by any means my students have estimated that a one inch rainfall on our campus generates a million gallons of runoff by looking at the different types of lands at how much area in each one and how much runoff we expect that's a lot of water that we could be using with just one inch collection so other things are talked about low water use flush valves waterless urinals and flow restrictors on faucets and so full should be used in restroom I don't know how much retrofitting we're going to do but certainly new buildings will be using that the students worked on a project if we retrofitted three dorms what would we save fifty thousand gallons a week is what they came up with for in terms of dollars we pay for our water right 175 week now that's not going to pay for itself real quickly right but still and again like I said you know local when you talk about water scarcity you know the fact that we're saving 50,000 gallons probably doesn't really mean that much here in easton most of the time but you get into drought conditions which we do get into and that might be a nice thing to be able to say more incremental progress we have these filtered these stations for filling up your bottles you know like your stainless bottle you refill that with filtered water from the tap I'm really setting a bad example here today I got this yesterday out out on the table came to Drew stock we have a complex lore essent replacement program energy is water we did a green roof installation on on the engineering building you see what that would cost it was sort of a trial run what's it going to cost how much engineering is involved could we upscale this with reasonable costs other parts of Tempest and I've actually instrumented a model right next to that where we measure how much water we trap by that and the students it's about an inch you can get about the first inch with the system life you could then it's it's got these particular types of plants sedum that that are adapted they can handle drought conditions it can be really dry and they'll still be alive but there's a little matrix of soil material and so water gets in there it captures some of the water then it overflows down into the downspout like any other roof but so some of the waters captured there's also benefits to energy because you get a little more insulation on the roof okay and so those plants are using that water and then you're using it on site rather than letting it run down the street other things solar panels support of the organic gardening project new construction we need these green building standards or to comply with now I'm going to run out of time on our engineers Without Borders is a cool thing that I've been doing with students economic scarcity that's an interesting concept down here there's plenty of water but there isn't plenty of money to clean it okay that's what we call economic scarcity so its up the outfits called engineers without borders but involves a lot of different students from different majors it's not just engineers because we found is it's really a lot of the problems not an engineering problem it's a lot of other things it's a national organization we've been around since 2003 we've been mostly self funded grants we've got some great doing it donations from local companies and so forth students are pulling it up money it's a new kind of engineering you know this is the old definition solving problems or creating useful products through the application of math and science right doesn't sound all that exciting this is more what we're about in this evolving world a new kind of engineers needed who can think broadly across disciplines and consider the human dimensions that are at the heart of every design challenge so we're trying to educate those kind of students in the real world with real constraints this is where we work euro region of Honduras it's very poor it's mountainous like picture out the right here somewhat a couple of communities have had systems that were defunct others have had no water system and so when you have no water system what do you do you send the women and the children down in a local stream to fill up their buckets that takes a lot of time and it keeps them out of school and doing other things that could generate economic benefit far as technology it's not complicated we know how to get rid of waterborne disease you can bleach it with chlorine you can use sand filters you can even use these polyethylene bottles and put them out in the Sun and maybe put them on a on a metal roof to improve the reflection and you can use solar UV to remove most of the bacteria within a couple of hours time a lot of this going on in over in India and we use gravity to the extent that we can because a lot of these places don't have don't have electricity and of course source protection and management is important I mean they don't seem to make the connection than if I've got my Burroughs and my cattle walking around by the spraying that that's a problem and so we've had to fence out you know areas for them and explain to them so key component community participation education and training that's what makes these systems work we can go build it design it build it and leave guaranteed it will fail and that's what has happened in the past and some some projects I think people now understand that that's not going to work and so you have to have a local partner you have to they have to understand maintenance they have to have the economic capability to do it we don't have time for the movie sorry some of the students who've been involved in doing this is our first trip down there that was the little there's a little spring there that's what we captured and piped down to a village this is like several miles up in the mountains here we're surveying always involve surveying to lay out where this pipe routes going to go for using gravity distribution so we do a lot of surveying work just some of the students having fun these are tanks that we used for sand filter sand filters for one of the villages okay the organic garden this is a collage of pictures that friend of mine put together what does this have to do with water well I already gave you a clue on that here's our daily requirements 224 liters to drink two thousand to four thousand liters to produce the food that we eat right isn't that interesting okay so we thought and we started this crazy thing with growing corn on the quad and two summers ago and I don't know if some of you saw that we were reading this book the freshman new Student Orientation they had to read this book called The Omnivore's Dilemma and it was about well we need anything we want what should we eat right so that's the dilemma and there's a big section on corn and all the implications of corn growing corn eating corn high-fructose corn syrup and all of that we decided well what better way and this is sort of goes along with my philosophy I told you about the beginning what better way to connect students to this then to grow some and eat it and see what it looks like and all that so we did and then we decided that's not enough we need something real this is just a demonstration project is just you know making a point let's make a garden so that's what we did and it's really taken off it's up there by Metzger fielders 40 plots are all taken this year every single one of them people out there growing their own food we collect water off the maintenance building up there and these two big tanks like I told you last week we were out of water first time that's happened but I think we might need bigger tanks poorly engineered perhaps we had a limited budget and okay I think I'm almost done here it's it's some challenges for sure it's a lot of work boy I don't keep the weeds out of my patch all summer I'll tell you that go away for a week and it rains and you're you're that's trouble right like next week when I go to Spain we found as organic right well what do we do when you find those things eating up your tomato plans you pick them off or you figure out some way you get up rid of them without chemicals here I like this one here first the woodchucks ate the broccoli now the zucchini that's mom coming home all mad here's a little boy his report in school next day perhaps my report woodchucks the most magnificent creatures in the world we had those we have done is we have rabbits now about the drought there's our spigots right it says stuff about conserve l I went out there a couple times last week in the heat I saw people with their with their hoses screwed up you know on those pickets and watering their garden I said well we can't have that how can I deal with this I can go around and and confront all these people about their poor water conservation i sat down told my excel student we have the summer Excel program this is why I love Excel kid says to me why don't you just cut them off cut the threads on I gave him a hug I actually gave we went out there with a hacksaw these are plastic so that took five minutes boom they're all all the threads are gone they're the taps are still there everybody has to use a watering can down right so we solved that problem but it became more manually and gentle that's true maybe people going with bigger tanks and put the threads back on and people be happier okay that's my last slide well there's nothing more important than water that's for sure Earth has limits in water food and energy are all interconnected I hope that's something that you take away from this and and at earth is that things are changing the system is under change great and very challenges for us and for future generations I hit on some of them certainly not near all of them it takes a lot of a whole room of expert to talk about all of this and finally that we are making progress here at Lafayette we're doing some interesting things I'd like to see us do more I'd like to see the entire library with a green roof on it for example and tanks around here that people when the grounds people are out there here gating the lawn they're hooking up to the rain water yes I just checked the other day because I don't like them up we're all the way up to c plus good question I'm not sure they are building a brand new environmental studies and science or something building so they're they're involved in this in this fight too okay that's it and I'm out of time

Channel: Lafayette College

Views: 3,791

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: water, crisis, environmental, engineering, sustainability, conservation, civil, David, Brandes

Id: IippPqCG-7I

Length: 90min 30sec (5430 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2010