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LOWER MERION — Employees from Aqua Pennsylvania this past week teamed up with Villanova Engineering students to hold one last meeting before they left for a weeklong trip to work on infrastructure projects to improve water quality and services in Panama.
The early March trip included much-needed diagnoses leading to the repairs of a water system serving more than 10,000 people.
In an interview before taking the students and engineers from Aqua, Jordan Ermilio, director at the Center for Humanitarian Engineering and International Development at Villanova University, said Aqua has project partners worldwide, not just Panama.
“This week alone, we’ll have close to 50 participants traveling to work with organizations in Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Navajo nation, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar and Cambodia,” Ermilio said.
For the work in Panama, Aqua engineers serve as professional mentors for the Villanova students.
The Panama trip’s big picture was that the effort was providing technical support for nonprofit organizations.
The problem they were working to solve was that a water system serving about 10,000 people hadn’t been working correctly.
For the past couple of years, the water flow that is supposed to be piped from the reservoirs has been declining, and now it’s nearly zero flow through the system. They have been troubleshooting to find the issue.
They suspect there’s a problem somewhere in the 4-inch pipe supplying water from the reservoir to the town.
Ermilio said the trip is providing the technical support for a nonprofit organization that will do the labor in fixing the problem.
“This type of program is unique to Villanova and the kind of work they are doing is not typical of an undergraduate university program,” Ermilio said.
Ermilio said this program differs from those where students spend a week or two building schools in another country. Instead, the Villanova students and the Aqua mentors work with and provide technical support and a nonprofit organization then gets the work done.
Kimberly Joyce, vice president of regulatory affairs for Essential, the parent company of Aqua Pennsylvania, said the company been partnering with Villanova in a student-focused program to mentor young professionals who might want to enter water and wastewater operations.
“We’re helping the students with our experts and years of experience identify where that water loss could be occurring,” Joyce said.
The work with the students and mentors in this Panamanian community goes back to 2016. Over that span, they’ve done other projects, such as helping rebuild water holding tanks.
“This crucial work is all part of a nearly decades-long partnership between Villanova University and Aqua. The Villanova Engineering Service Learning Program provides technical support in the form of engineering design and research services to humanitarian organizations worldwide,” Aqua officials wrote in a press release about the trip.
