Engineers Study Hurricane Effects on Water Quality and Public Health

Wearing waders and face masks, Rice University  engineering professors and graduate students explored the natural laboratory that Tropical Storm Harvey's floodwaters created in Houston's neighborhoods and beyond. The team was on a mission to collect samples of floodwater. They will use the collected data from flooded areas to study Harvey's short- and long-term impact on water quality and related public health issues. Rice professor Qilin Li said analysis will look for signs of chemical and biological contaminants in floodwaters. "We don't want this to be just a short-term study," she said. "We want to look at the dynamics of the contaminants, how quickly they show up in the floodwater and, once the floodwater recedes, how quickly or slowly they go away."

Transcript

00:00:00 this is the line this is the water line here I think for all these things it prepared me because I just imagined so many times in many ways that what my house looked like to look at all the furnitures all shifted and fell that's that's even out of my imagination one of the worst floods Houston has had in a long time probably the worst and I remember and so we're interested in how

00:00:42 these type of extreme flooding events affect water quality in the Houston area so we've taken samples from different bayous and creeks in the Greater Houston area looking at how say wastewater treatment plants or petrochemical facilities might be washing contaminants into our waterways and so we looked at looked at it when the buyers are high and then we went back and looked when

00:01:07 they dropped a little bit we've looked inside some homes in the area to see what type of biological contaminants metals organics such as like chemicals and pesticides we're finding in the water so yeah be interesting to see how these type of extreme flooding events affect water quality in the Houston area it is kind of a severe situation like Harvey damaged the lab and many people

00:01:34 volunteer to help neighbors and it's really nice thing and also right students also have a lot of neighbors as a environmental scientist and engineer we do water sampling and analyzing and we provide the correct information to public which is very important as well I mean it's pretty important learning from mistakes as per engineering you know I mean it's like the whole goal of the

00:01:57 community of engineers is to design safer and more you know better places to live and so when things go wrong you know that's sad but the most important thing is to learn from that