Professors Joe Goodwill, Vinka Oyanedel-Craver, Tom Boving, and Ali Akanda at the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering on URI’s Kingston Campus.

These researchers say clean water is possible the world over. They are using and studying diverse technologies, from the simplest to the most advanced. But they all say changing the way we think about water is key.

By Marybeth Reilly-McGreen

Threats to freshwater are a common refrain in news coverage of natural disasters, contamination catastrophes, and health crises. And for good reason.

Half of the world’s population, 4 billion people, will experience water scarcity this year. About 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, according to the United Nations. Unsafe water, substandard sanitation, and subpar hygiene cause the deaths of 1,000 children a day, according to UNICEF.

Such statistics have prompted some scientists, economists, and business leaders to proclaim that water is the new oil. And while some places experience urgent and prolonged water problems because of socioeconomic disparities—the Flint, Mich., water crisis that began in 2014, for example—water troubles recognize no borders and make no class or income distinctions.

Thomas Boving, professor and chair of URI’s Department of Geosciences and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is a hydrogeologist who studies coastal Rhode Island’s freshwater supplies. The pressure placed on the coast’s freshwater supply by tourism and climate change, he says, could create a serious water crisis and tank communities’ tourism-based economies.

We need to change our relationship with water, Boving says.

“We have to be cognizant of the limitations of our natural environment and think about the future—that should be on everyone’s mind,” says Boving. “We need to change our attitudes toward water. It is a finite resource; high-quality water has a value that must be accounted for properly. And if that means water costs more in the future, well, maybe that incentivizes us to use less of what we have—and to use it more wisely.”

Boving has made access to freshwater a research priority. So have the three principal investigators in URI’s Water for the World Lab—Ali Akanda, Vinka Oyanedel-Craver, and Joseph Goodwill. All three are professors of civil and environmental engineering and, along with Boving, they are engaged in humanitarian engineering and in monitoring some of the most pressing water issues in Rhode Island and around the globe. They are exploring old and new technologies for recycling contaminated water, investigating ways to make water stronger under stress, and developing novel systems for predicting waterborne disease outbreaks.

Ali Akanda is an associate professor and graduate director in the civil and environmental engineering department of the College of Engineering. His research areas include hydrologic forecasting, water-related disasters, climate change impacts on water security, emerging water and health issues, hydro-climatic influences on cholera, and early warning systems for the global health community.

Ali Akanda: Predicting Waterborne Disease

From his office in the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering, Ali Akanda uses the Google Earth Engine to demonstrate how he, his colleagues, and students are using computer modeling and satellite datasets to create early warning systems and avert cholera outbreaks. At the moment, he is focusing on how climate change and increased water demand affect water security, agriculture, and public health issues around the world. His monitor displays an area of the Middle East. The specific location must be kept secret for geopolitical reasons.

“This map shows how dry the area is and where agricultural pockets are,” Akanda says. “We found out growers were using up their groundwater at an alarming rate—three times the rate they officially claimed. So, if they say they have about 60 years’ worth of water there, we think it’ll run out in 20 or 30 years.”

Akanda is no stranger to water crises. He grew up in Bangladesh, where two of Asia’s largest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, form the biggest delta in the world and flow into the Bay of Bengal. There, the monsoon brings record downpours in a rainy season that lasts four months. Akanda saw extreme weather drain rivers dry and then flood them to the size of an ocean. “I was always fascinated by water and its changes,” he says.

“In Bangladesh, there’s great water scarcity in the dry season and then huge floods when the monsoon comes. You see the disaster and the people’s suffering almost every year,” Akanda adds. “And, of course, with water problems come disease and public health problems.”

Akanda and his students are monitoring the conditions that seed cholera outbreaks. Cholera, a waterborne disease, is preventable but can be deadly for some people if they don’t get treatment quickly enough. Cholera often goes underreported, making accurate numbers hard to come by.

But the World Health Organization estimates there are between 1.3 million and 4 million cholera cases worldwide, annually. Of those, 21,000 to 143,000 result in death.

“What we can do as scientists is monitor the environmental changes happening before the outbreak happens. That’s how we started using satellite datasets,” Akanda says. “We are able to get observations around the clock and from across the world—of rainfall, streamflow, soil moisture, temperature, amount of vegetation, the color of the water—that we can combine in our models to predict areas that may be more at risk.

“If we know a particular area is at risk, or higher risk, than surrounding areas, the information can be taken to public-health decision-makers and people on the ground so that they know the risks. Such early warnings can potentially help them make lifesaving decisions.

“Our goal, says Akanda, “is to change the top-down approach to a bottom-up, grassroots approach, and convey cholera-risk information directly to users through technology, like smartphones apps.”

Akanda has evidence such an approach can work. He recently led a team on a pilot project in which a simple smartphone app was used as a risk communication tool in a rural area of Bangladesh. The project, funded by NASA, showed that technical information about cholera risk can be directly communicated to people to inform and influence their water usage behavior.

Tom Boving is a professor of environmental hydrology in the Department of Geosciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences and an affiliated member of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty. His research interests include the fate and transport of organic and inorganic contaminants, innovative remediation technologies, and stormwater treatment and bank filtration technology. He has been an expert witness in water pollution litigation.

Tom Boving: We Might Need to Change Our Water Practices

For the past 15 years, Tom Boving has worked with communities in southern India to establish riverbank filtration systems—using a 4,000- to 5,000-year-old technology described in the Bible.

“What’s new about the technology is that people forgot about it; it’s basically exploiting natural filtration processes, forcing water from polluted rivers to infiltrate the surrounding sediments—gravel, sand, and whatnot,” Boving says.

“We’re forcing surface water to move through the ground toward a well,” he continues. “During that passage through sediments, bacteria are removed, heavy metal loads are reduced, and some fertilizers are remediated. What we end up with is water that’s much better than it was at the surface.”

Closer to home, Boving has worked with the Block Island Water Company to monitor the island’s water usage. Block Island is small—7 miles long and 3 miles wide—but data gathered there offers insight into global water issues such as the effects of changing water tables, rainfall levels, and drought on a community’s freshwater supply.

For instance, if demand causes an island’s aquifer to be overpumped, it can become contaminated with salt water. If rainfall doesn’t replenish an aquifer, access to fresh water is jeopardized.

So, for a community like Block Island, a drought during peak tourism season could be devastating.

“If surface water—water in lakes and rivers—goes dry, you can bet that affects groundwater,” Boving says. “So, if droughts become more common, we’ll see more stress on our water resources.”

Tourist season on Block Island brings the island’s aquifer “to the brink,” Boving says. “Is Block Island in imminent danger of losing its water or can we find a strategy, a pathway to accommodate the tourist economy with what’s available?

“We need more information, more years of study,” he continues. “It’s an interesting project because it reflects what’s going on in other parts of the country, of the world, where people are facing the same issue: Is there enough water to sustain our practices, or do we maybe have to change our habits, our way of life?”

Vinka Oyanedel-Craver is a professor of environmental and civil engineering and associate dean for research in URI’s College of Engineering. She studies environmental and sustainable engineering, water and wastewater technologies, environmental nanotechnology, international development, diversity in the water sector, and environmental justice. She has led several research and service-learning initiatives in South Africa, Guatemala, Jordan, Ghana, and Chile.

Vinka Oyanedel-Craver: Simple Technology Can Be the Best Solution

Vinka Oyanedel-Craver has worked with people in remote villages across five continents to manufacture ceramic water filtration systems. She displays a PowerPoint slide showing two images. On the left is an image of two petri dishes, one that teems with gray slime and black dots resembling poppy seeds. On the right is an image of two young girls holding single-use water bottles filled with ochre-colored water, their tap water.

The muck in the petri dish grew from a sample of that tap water. Every black dot is a potentially pathogenic bacterium, Oyanedel-Craver says. “So, here we have 1,000 potentially pathogenic bacteria. To put it in perspective, our regulations allow for zero pathogenic bacteria.

“This is the reality of the water some people are drinking. Globally, this can result in hundreds of millions of people getting sick. The part that is critical for me,” says Oyanedel-Craver, “is that most of those people are going to be children, aged 5 and younger, because they are more vulnerable to the dehydration caused by waterborne illness.”

It doesn’t have to be that way.

“This is a completely preventable situation,” Oyanedel-Craver says. “This is not
a medical problem. We can prevent all such diseases from happening using simple technologies.”

The answer, she says, is to work with each community to understand its capacity for adopting and supporting technological interventions. Put another way, researchers like Oyanedel-Craver mustn’t barrel into a community and install high-tech filtration systems. Supply chain issues, cost of materials, and community education levels can determine whether a particular water filtration device is a sustainable solution. “Sophisticated technology solutions are not good in a community that doesn’t have the experience and technical skills to manage them,” Oyanedel-Craver says.

“We need solutions that communities can afford and are capable of maintaining long-term, socially acceptable solutions that people want to use,” she says.

The filtration solution Oyanedel-Craver prefers is a ceramic water filter that looks very much like a flowerpot that works like a low-tech microfiltration membrane. “The entire process, from the collection of the material to the processing, pressing, firing, and testing of the filters,” she says, “can be done by potters in the local community.”

These ceramic water filters reduce bacteria by 99.9% and have a 95% community acceptance rate.

Oyanedel-Craver estimates she’s introduced more than 60 URI students to these sustainable filtration systems which, in addition to filtering drinking water, can also be used in wastewater management. “Our students have engaged with local governments, worked on rainwater harvesting systems, and they’ve even built a biodigester to take advantage of organic matter to produce energy. In one town, they developed one of the first water-quality laboratories.”

But perhaps the most important thing the students have learned is cultural awareness.

“You can have the greatest technologies, but if you don’t educate the users—if you don’t communicate and work with them—they are not going to be working at their prime,” Oyanedel-Craver says. “Affordability, social acceptance, and simplicity—or matching the technological capacity to the community—is critical.”

Joe Goodwill is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. He studies physical-chemical processes as they relate to water quality. He is also interested in water poverty issues and wastewater treatment and reuse. Goodwill has worked with non-governmental organizations in Bolivia, Ghana, India, and Malawi.

Joe Goodwill: Water, Under Pressure

What galvanization does for steel, Joe Goodwill is doing for drinking water.

Goodwill, who holds the Carroll D. & Charles M. Billmyer professorship in engineering, is on a mission to get his peers thinking about how chemically treating water systems, rendering them “anti-fragile,” might strengthen that water when it’s placed under stress from pollutants. Goodwill argues that anti-fragility is a kind of insurance plan against major disruptive events such as a global pandemic or the effects of climate change.

“You’re not so beholden to models to predict the future. It’s kind of freeing,” Goodwill says. “If you think, as I do, that things are getting more volatile, then having an adversarial relationship with the future is a losing proposition.

“That’s the soapbox I’m on right now.”

Goodwill is the product of a happy rural childhood in Camden, N.Y.—near the Adirondacks. “My childhood imbued me with an appreciation for nature and for the struggles that exist in rural America,” he says. “One of those struggles is that there are higher risks of water quality violations that can affect people’s health in rural America.”

In a proposal for a National Science Foundation grant, Goodwill focused on how science might solve water quality violations in rural areas. He argued that part of the challenge is that the technology brought to bear on the problem is inappropriate for smaller systems. “I don’t think we sit down often enough and ask if what works in Providence or Boston is going to work in Exeter, Rhode Island,” he says. “I think if we did that, we’d admit that the answer is ‘no,’ at least in terms of water quality.”

“I’m a professor in environmental engineering because I’m an optimist and I’m willing to fight for the environment. What does that mean? Our industrialized humanity does great damage to the environment, and that can impact our public health,” Goodwill says. “When we pollute the sources of our drinking water, that becomes a problem. But I believe that environmental engineering exists so that we don’t have to make all the trade-offs that we otherwise deserve, meaning we can live in cities and produce a ton of waste and keep it out of our drinking water sources.

Joe Goodwill in the Water for the World Lab in the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering on URI’s Kingston Campus.

“We can commute all over and have our stormwater adequately managed.
A lot of these problems are solvable. It’s just a matter of allocating resources and applying human potential,” Goodwill continues. “So, I hope a student in one of my classes walks away with the idea that the problems in front of us—at least our environmental ones—can be solved.”

It will be an all-hands-on-deck endeavor, requiring investment in infrastructure and technology and requiring government and research institutions to work together.

“Sometimes it’s a matter of technology not being available. But, oftentimes, it’s just a matter of getting it done—and maybe some political will and funding,” Goodwill says. “But—and I hope my students share my perspective—it’s not a doomsday situation. The best days could still be in front of us.

“But we have to be good stewards of the environment and protect public health.”

PHOTOS: SETH JACOBSON, NORA LEWIS; COURTESY VINKA OYANEDEL-CRAVER

The Water for the World Lab in URI’s Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering is supported by a gift from Barry Gertz ’76 and Sandy Gertz ’86.