Articles

Environmental Engineering with LCA Environmental

Mark Boyd of LCA Environmental, and the current ASCE Dallas Branch Past-President, spoke to the CE Club students at Hillcrest and Woodrow Wilson High Schools about water resources and environmental engineering. The discussion started off with a run through the water cycle, including evaporation, condensation, precipitation, groundwater, surface water, and surface run off. Mark then had the students consider surface run off specifically. They were asked to list off what could be contained in surface run off and how do engineers need to handle and treat that water.

Mark then had a great group activity for the students to perform an improptu water quality risk assessment. The classroom was split up into teams, and each team had to evaluate the purity of ten different water samples with varying levels of contamination. Some samples had obvious bits of dirt, particles, and oil floating in them, while others appeared to be perfectly clear and “clean”. The students were tasked with ranking the ten samples in order of their own concept of “cleanliness”. Afterwards, Mark would reveal to the students the true ranking of the samples based on mandated requirements for drinking water.

Engineers Without Borders

Julie Jones of Nathan D. Maier Consulting Engineers took time to talk about the impact she is making outside of her office job as a volunteer for Engineers Without Borders. She hoped to inspire the students to use their engineering skills to improve the world while also expanding their perspective on the world by traveling to other parts of the world that have much greater needs than those in our country. Julie began by giving the students an overview of the EWB mission, vision, and project types. She then went into deeper detail about a recent project she has been working on in the community of Culli Culli Alto, Bolivia. She described all the information her team gathered during an assessment trip to see how EWB could best serve the community.  The community was in dire need of clean drinking water after the local well broke down. They worked to determine what went wrong with the current well and what could have been done to prevent in failure. Options for a water system were developed and analyzed, and the construction of a final design will be completed in the fall.

She also explained to the students that a sustainable project is needed so that the locals can maintain and fix the system with local materials and knowledge. Towards the end of the presentation she challenged the students to come up with their own ideas for how they would collect data from the local community and how they would design and phase a sustainable project that meets the needs of the community.

If you are interested in speaking to the CE Club please contact Jennifer Smith ([email protected]) or Omar Venzor ([email protected]).