Most Americans take pure, fresh drinking water for granted.
But for almost half the world’s population—more than a billion people—the lack of decent water is one of their chief concerns. Nearly one in five people have no access to clean water, and 25,000 people are said to die each day from a lack of water or contaminated drinking water.
The United Nations proclaimed 2003 as the International Year of Freshwater, and in January 2004, President Bush signed the FY 2004 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which provided $100 million to address the critical shortage of safe drinking water in developing countries.
High-level U.S. officials also pressed public and private leaders to launch efforts to reach what became known as the Millennium Development Goal of cutting in half the number of people without safe water and sanitation by 2015.
USC joined the effort a year and a half ago when it partnered with a Charleston company to test its compact drinking water treatment systems for use where highly contaminated water might need to be purified.
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| Stephen McAnally |
“We wanted to look at an application of the system in a hypothetical situation where a water source might be highly contaminated from animal or even human waste and still be safe to drink after treatment,” said Stephen McAnally, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
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| Tammy Gray |
Under an arrangement with the University’s Center for Manufacturing and Technology and Water Missions International, the Charleston manufacturer of the systems, McAnally and engineering graduate student Tammy Gray, a captain in the U.S. Air Force, tested the Living Water Treatment System using effluent from a wastewater plant at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter.
The water was fed into the system at Shaw as a simulation to test its effectiveness under a wide range of severe operating conditions. As a result of their work, McAnally and Gray recommended operational guidelines for the treatment of severely contaminated water and suggested modification to system components for the chemical process application.
The work was done under a $15,000 grant from the Center for Manufacturing and Technology, which helps stimulate economic development in South Carolina by partnering the University with small businesses to provide them with technological research or consulting work they need to prosper.
Water Missions International also provided the unit, time, and service from their employees to take part in the testing.
From a monetary standpoint, said McAnally, the work was not one of the College of Engineering and Information Technology’s larger research projects, but was very rewarding from a professional and personal standpoint.
It also was in line with efforts by the college to have its students think more globally about issues that inevitably will affect engineering graduates, whether they live and work in South Carolina, or elsewhere.
Water Missions International’s Living Water Treatment Systems are in use in developing countries throughout the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Asia countries devastated by the tsunami. They are designed to be operated by locally trained people and can produce up to 10,000 gallons of fresh water daily, enough to supply a town of about 3,000 people.
The research conducted by USC was important in achieving the Millennium Development Goal because in order to reach the milestone more severely contaminated sources of water will have to be treated for human consumption, McAnally said.
McAnally is an affiliated faculty member with the School of the Environment where he works with dean Bruce Coull and Patricia Jerman, project manager of the school’s Sustainable Universities Initiative, to pursue interdisciplinary teaming on campus.
“As a key tenet to this research we wanted to enhance student and faculty awareness to foster sustainable thinking in our engineering approaches,’ McAnally said. “This is one of the types of activities that help drive that home.”
In the future, said McAnally, he would like to continue working with Water Missions International, particularly by getting undergraduates involved with the water systems and applications research in Charleston.
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Stephen McAnally, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Tammy Gray set up the Living Water Treatment System at Shaw Air Force Base before testing the system for extreme operating conditions.
