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In the village schools of Cumayasa in the Dominican Republic the water is now safe to drink.

Until recently, that wasn't the case. Students brought in juice boxes. A few had hydration packs, or water bladders. Much of the time, they were thirsty.

The schools' water supply comes from a treatment plant in the nearby city of La Romana. But it's not drinking water. It's contaminated, and known to cause waterborne diseases such as cholera, hepatitis and E. coli. If anyone drank from the tap—and sometimes the children did drink—they usually got sick.

But during spring break in March, five UNH civil and environmental engineering students helped add a purification system to the schools' water source. They used filters and PVC pipes and a type of chlorine similar to that found in household bleach. And when they were done, everyone took a drink of the water.

"The kids were so happy to actually be able to drink the water," says Tad Robertson '12, project director for the team. "You could tell that they were hesitant at first, but after we all drank it, they did, too."

Emily Carlson '12 says the project bridged the gap between the academic concepts of water treatment they learned in classrooms and the real-life water issues faced by millions of people around the world. "Most of the lessons I learned on this trip were not of the engineering sort, but the kind someone discovers when opening their mind to a new culture," she says. "I met some of the most dedicated people, dedicated to their work, to their families and to their country's future."

The first phase, done last year as a senior capstone project by a different group of engineering students, provided the preliminary concept and a feasibility study.

The system itself was created as the capstone project for Robertson, Carlson, Ransom Horner-Richardson '12, Harrison Roakes '12 and Alexander Rozycki '12. They got help from Kayla Mineau '12 of Students Without Borders and civil engineering faculty members M. Robin Collins, Kevin Gardner, Nancy Kinner '80G, '83G and James Malley.

The second phase put the idea into practice.

This year's group spent their winter break testing the system. After connecting the chlorine, four filters and a network of PVC piping, they used water from the Durham wastewater treatment plant to mimic the potability of the water they would encounter in Cumayasa.

The plan was to supply water to about 300 students in the village high school. But when the team arrived in the Dominican Republic, they learned the water was going to also serve an elementary school of 900 students. "The increase in the number of students meant they would be using a lot more water per day than we had intended," Robertson says.

And it was more water than the system was engineered for. That meant having to revisit the design right there on the spot; no going back to Gregg Hall and the mock-up that had allowed them to extensively test the filters in a theoretical environment.

"We had to recalculate the dose of chlorine, and we had to rethink the life of the filters," Robertson says. "Using four times more water than we'd originally planned was going to mean replacing the filters more often than we'd thought."

They also needed a bigger tank. The water for the schools is stored in a large cistern. To fill it, someone from the school has to open a valve and then wait. It takes as many as two days for water to travel from La Romana. School officials never knew how many gallons of water they would get at one time.

As it turned out, what delayed installing the purification system wasn't the redesign—it was the Dominican Republic's Customs office. After three days of waiting for the parts that had been shipped from Durham to be released, the high school principal went to the airport and came back with the supplies. There was also the issue of power outages. But the students persevered.

"These students worked long and hard overcoming so many challenges to provide safe drinking water to 1,200 schoolchildren in this very, very poor community," says Malley. "They simply refused to fail. It was really inspiring." ~