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Students from the Technology Clinic have been working with the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership for the past year on an urban ecology project concerning the management of storm water runoff.
Two public workshops have been scheduled to share information with residents and get feedback. The workshops will be held 7 p.m. Tuesday Dec. 8 and 15, in the Easton Area Community Center on the corner of South Ninth and Washington streets. The students will be highlighting urban gardening and urban farming using storm water runoff and will sell rain barrels at a 50 percent discount to help residents get started using rainwater for their gardens.
The students have been studying storm water runoff and ways of storing and reusing rainwater to minimize storm water flooding streams or swamping Easton’s combined sanitary and storm water system. They have also investigated using landscaping and trees to absorb storm water to recharge the water aquifer below ground.
“We hope selling rain barrels at a large discount will encourage some residents to try using rainwater in urban gardening or farming,” says Brad Williams ’10 (Marriottsville, Md.).
Tom Jones and Gary Bertsch of the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership have been working with the students along with Tech Clinic advisers Dan Bauer, professor of anthropology and sociology, and Lawrence Malinconico, associate professor of geology and environmental geosciences.
Other members of the Tech Clinic team include Sam Bloom ’10 (Washington, D.C.), Mean Feeney ’12 (Webster, N.Y.), Hannah Pingry ’10 (Huntingdon, Pa.), and Cara Murphy ’11 (New Providence, N.J).
Lafayette’s Tech Clinic is a hands-on course that brings together students from different majors to help solve real-world problems. This project is a continuation of a previous Tech Clinic’s efforts in the West Ward to improve the neighborhood’s urban ecology, which concerns interactions between people and nature in city environments.