5/22/2014 Chelsey Coombs
Written by Chelsey Coombs
Mary Beth Howard is a junior in General Engineering, with a minor in business, who has also competed with the University of Illinois Varsity Swim Team for the last three years (recently participating in a record-breaking relay at the Big 10 Championship). But this summer, she traveled Central America to make a different kind of splash: at Ministries of Divine Mercy, a K-12 school in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, she implemented a clean water system she designed under the supervision of Associate Professor Harrison Kim.
Mary Beth’s parents, working with a group of Christian missionaries, make yearly visits to third world countries to help better residents’ living conditions. In May 2013, during a trip with them to the school in Honduras, Mary Beth saw an opportunity to combine her compassion and engineering skills to solve a problem. She improved the school’s computer lab, installing operating systems and repairing computers, and initiated a project to install an internet satellite dish. As the school community previously had no internet connection and no libraries, her general engineering skills allowed her to create a vital educational resource for the teachers and students.
But her multidisciplinary abilities as a general engineering student are not limited to computer networks—she can also build water networks.
During the trip, she observed that the school water system produced impure drinking water. The old system siphoned rainwater through PVC piping from a 10,000-gallon storage tank seven miles up in the mountains to a 400-gallon tank on the school roof. From this tank, the water goes to an above-ground cement storage tank. This water is used for all purposes, including drinking, but its contamination issues make it hazardous for human consumption.
The people of the town tried to remedy the situation with a well, but unfortunately, due to legal issues with the well’s location, they were kept from beginning the clean water project.
Through this, Mary Beth saw another opportunity to enact real change for the people of Tegucigalpa.
In the fall, back at the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, Mary Beth took her concerns to Professor Kim. In the fall semester, she took Kim‘s engineering design course (GE 310). That spring, she did an independent study GE 397 Independent Study with Kim to design a clean water system. Her new system taps into the 400-gallon tank, runs the water through a sediment filter, a carbon block filter, and exposes it to UV lighting to keep pathogens like bacteria and viruses from reproducing, thus making it safe for humans to drink. This pure, filtered drinking water is then kept in a sterile storage tank.
Over the summer, she flew back to Tegucigalpa to implement the system, parts in tow. At first, the system was going to be completely outdoors; however, a local said the children who live on the school’s property were a bit mischievous and might be prone to tampering with the system. So it was on to Plan B.
“I came in thinking this was going to be it, we are just going to do it, get it done, it’ll be simple. But then we had to figure out a way to tap into the existing system we had designed and branch it off to go inside the school,” Mary Beth said.
Mary Beth and her team bought a drill to get the PVC pipes through the school’s wall and set up the system inside. They set to work to install the entire system and were ready to test it out. But when they plugged in the UV lamp, it started smoking – they had accidently run 120V through the 12V lamp.
“After the lamp broke, I was so heartbroken,” Mary Beth said. “But the best part was the support everyone gave us. They were like, “No, it’s okay, this stuff happens in the real world, you’re going to run into problems in engineering, thorough life, that’s just when you go to Plan B, or in our case, Plan C.”
And that’s what Mary Beth and her team did; another mission trip group arrived in Honduras a few weeks later with a new UV lamp, and when they plugged it in, the water was crystal clear, just as they had planned. She accomplished her goal to bring clean drinking water to the school and the surrounding community.
Although Mary Beth won’t graduate until May 2015, she already has big plans. She hopes to get a job in technical consulting where she can combine her love of talking to people with business and engineering.
Now that’s how a dedicated engineer and Christian humanitarian spends her summer vacation.
Des Peres Hospital in St. Louis contributed funds for the effort.