Several students from Carroll College will travel to Mexico next month to help install a sewer and septic system at an orphanage in the southeast part of the country.

Through the college's two-year-old chapter of Engineers Without Borders, nine students along with a faculty advisor and local professional engineer will spend eight days in Queretaro, implementing the system they designed.

The current situation at the orphanage, home to some 250 children, involves an open wastewater trench and a leaking lagoon that contaminates a nearby river.

Working with students at University of Queretaro, the Carroll students will install nearly a half-mile of PVC pipe to carry waste, along with a septic-type system to contain and eventually purify the wastewater before it reaches a river.

Fish tanks containing tilapia will be installed to help with water purification, and the resulting graywater will be used to irrigate adjacent cropland.

"We're trying to create a sustainable situation, so we don't want to bring in new technology that would be difficult to maintain down there," said Andrew Stewart, a senior civil engineering major and the EWB chapter president. "It's called a graywater system because it has all those other attributes."

Stewart has already traveled twice to Queretaro, once last fall to develop the project and again earlier this spring to line up materials for the work.

The crops irrigated with the graywater will be fed to cattle, helping the orphanage and the area feed themselves.

"It's a very well-rounded and cyclical process," said sophomore Jacquie Schmidt. "It's neat because it's so simplistic that a biology major (like herself) and all the people of the community can understand it. The goal is to teach them, to say, 'Look at what you have, and look at what you can do with it.'"

Carroll nursing students have developed a health survey that will be administered at two separate times to measure the effectiveness of the new system.

Dr. John Scharf, chair of the college's Department of Mathematics, Engineering and Computer Science, said the creation of the chapter has helped energize the school's decade-old engineering program.

"For me it's an exciting evolution in the development of the civil engineering program at Carroll," he said. "It's an activity we've promoted through the years, and to see it come to fruition is very rewarding."

John Harrington

can be reached at 447-4080 or john.harrington@helenair.com.