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Civil engineering major Joaquin Indacochea Beltran ’11 (Arequipa, Peru) is working on EXCEL research with Kristen Sanford Bernhardt, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, focusing on the sustainability of rural potable water systems in developing countries.
Water infrastructure is not a major concern for most people in our modern world. We take water for granted because water somehow gets to our taps, showers, and industries. As a consequence, we usually forget that our subsistence and prosperity greatly depend on the well-being of treatment plants, pipelines, and other components that distribute potable water to our houses.
This summer, I have had the privilege to work with Professor Sanford Bernhardt as an EXCEL scholar. We are doing research on the sustainability of rural potable water systems in developing countries. Our investigation is part of a larger research project on sustainability that involves other professors and many other students in engineering and economics.
My focus is on the technical sustainability of rural water systems in less developed countries, whereas two other students are working on the economic and environmental aspects of sustainability. To start my investigation I read a series of papers on the sustainability of built systems with a focus on community-owned infrastructure. This gave me a better understanding of the background of such projects. I also reviewed papers on sustainability indicators and prepared a summary. I am currently gathering data available on the Internet and organizing it using spreadsheets to be able to compare different case studies.
Finding the right data has definitely been the most challenging part so far since most available data are too qualitative. This process can be frustrating at times because the amount of time invested researching might not yield the outcomes one wants. Prof. Sanford Bernhardt always teaches me to look at those moments as valuable learning experiences. Nevertheless, I have found good data that we can use to continue the research. A large portion of such data was in Spanish so I have been able to use my Spanish skills as well.
The EXCEL research I am doing is a great experience for me because I am able to use the concepts behind sustainability I learned last semester in my Values and Science/Technology class, which was also taught by Prof. Sanford Bernhardt. We studied real-world cases and determined the different factors that make built systems more or less sustainable. While I do my research, I am learning what should be taken into consideration when an engineer or planner has to deal with different aspects of the construction process: technical, social, economic, political, and environmental.
This investigation is certainly very exciting for me because it allows me to understand better how the world works, especially in less developed countries like my own country, Peru. I believe that the outcomes of our investigation will help in rethinking different aspects of the feasibility, design, and implementation stages of water projects in poor rural communities. In fact, I am sure that our conclusions will be useful for the Lafayette College chapter of Engineers Without Borders in its ongoing work with rural villages in Honduras.