Just hours after the tsunami struck on December 26, 2004, members of Stanford's chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World circulated an e-mail urging the group to get involved in recovery efforts. ESW's mission is to apply engineering skills to develop communities in sustainable and culturally sensitive ways. What greater challenge than to help devastated communities transition from disaster relief to long-term rebuilding?
“We wanted to match our resident expertise with what people needed most,” says Molly Morse, third-year doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering and ESW's project coordinator. “And we wanted to go to underserved areas, where there was not a lot of NGO [nongovernmental organization] help already.”
After three months of poring over reports from Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and Africa, the group of about a dozen undergraduates and graduate students decided to focus its efforts on the Andaman Islands, an isolated Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal, about 740 miles from the closest Indian port, Chennai (Madras), and 120 miles off the coast of Myanmar. Although the tiny archipelago suffered massive destruction from both the tsunami and the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that preceded it, the remote islands had received scant attention from relief organizations.
“The area is so inaccessible,” Morse explains. “Materials cannot be easily transported in. The main jetty is destroyed; crossing from boat to shore is extremely precarious. It's really hard to work there, but we weren't considering that a limitation.”
Helping matters considerably was ESW's association with two NGOs knowledgeable about the area, Volunteers for India Development and Empowerment, and Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development. SEEDS was already working in the Andamans and could provide information, offer advice and relay local residents' needs and concerns. Students learned that the most urgent problems facing the island communities involved water reclamation and filtration, and permanent housing. They spent spring quarter designing and prototyping solutions in CEE 177S/277, Design for a Sustainable World. Participants brainstormed about water collection and storage devices, concentrating on purification and portability. Others addressed housing issues, hoping to fashion a more sustainable alternative to the designs proposed by India's Ministry of Urban Development.
As summer break approached, the students gathered up their meticulously researched plans and prepared to journey to the other side of the world. The group broke into smaller teams of two to three, “each person with a different expertise,” and staggered their stays, according to Sophie Walewijk, fifth-year doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering and co-founder of ESW. “The idea was to be able to transfer knowledge from team to team throughout the summer.”
When the first group arrived in Port Blair, South Andaman Island, in early June, they quickly learned perhaps the foremost requirement of disaster relief work: flexibility. That, Morse notes, and “general engineering skills come in real handy.”
She would know. Morse and fellow researcher Karim Al-Khafaji, a third-year doctoral student in biological sciences, had barely stepped off the plane—after 30-something flying hours and one failed attempt to land during a monsoon—when officials unexpectedly asked them to perform an analysis of the earthquake damage. Fortunately, both students had experience as surveyors, and Morse was knowledgeable about structural retrofitting. The pair spent two weeks in Port Blair examining ruined houses, farms, businesses and community centers before heading off to their original destination, Little Andaman Island.
When they finally reached Hutbay, a boat ride that takes anywhere from six to 12 hours, Morse and Al-Khafaji faced another surprise: an abundance of fresh water. “A lot of people said they were okay, if not better off than before the tsunami,” Morse recalls. “And there was already lot of knowledge about purification.” Lesson two: there's no substitute for going to the source for up-to-the-minute information.
The real issue was water storage, both building and maintaining adequate reservoirs, and—more pressing—clearing out massive pools of stagnant, disease-ridden water resulting from a lack of natural drainage in the surrounding valley. “We had to get water out to Nala [a nearby creek], make it flow downhill somehow,” Morse says. “We were starting to see cases of malaria.” Plans quickly shifted to focus on the design and construction of a drainage trench and new sanitary facilities.
As their six-week stint wore on, Morse and Al-Khafaji renovated temporary housing structures and began work on prototypes for permanent shelters. They also contributed to the design for a tsunami memorial and educational resource center.
One student remains on Little Andaman and is expected back on campus in November. Construction of the permanent shelters is slated to begin soon; the whole project will likely take two or three years. The October 8 earthquake in Kashmir has posed a setback, since both SEEDS and the Indian government have had to turn attention there.
The Design for a Sustainable World course continues its hands-on work this fall, designing a combination school/orphanage outside of Chennai. “Ideally, we want to continue our projects over many years, promoting sustainability in social, environmental and economic ways,” Walewijk says. “We're interested in the long-term benefits.”
