Portobelo, a former Spanish colonial town in Panama, is relatively well developed. But the town has only one facility for treating its waste water.

Most of the excess dirty water is dumped directly into streams that then empty into the bay, said Aaron Greco, an mechanical engineering graduate student.

Greco is a member of Northwestern’s chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, which traveled to Panama in December after more than a year of planning and preparation.

Greco and three other students visited Portobelo and Santo Domingo. They were looking for ways to help the communities find ways to develop while minimizing strain on natural resources.

“If we can help them be more sustainable as a community, they are putting less impact on their environment,” Greco said.

Santo Domingo is a rural area where the community is dispersed and most of the people are cattle ranchers, Greco said.

The cattle graze in hilly pastures and walk down to streams to get water, Greco said. This causes the hills to erode and increases the amount of mud in the streams.

One potential solution is to design a way to deliver water to the cattle so they don’t have to walk down to the stream, Greco said.

Now, two four-person teams in an NU engineering class are trying to design solutions to problems the group identified on its trip.

One team in the class, part of NU’s Institute for Design Engineering and Applications, is working to design safer ways to dispose of Portobelo’s waste water so it won’t be dumped directly into local streams. A second team is trying to reduce soil erosion in Santo Domingo.

“The hope is that this is just the ground for starting our own (ESW) class,” said Debra Weissman, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student who went on the trip.

The ESW trip identified four additional projects in the Santo Domingo area.

“These other projects are not actually being worked on right now,” Greco said. “We are trying to encourage interest in picking up projects such as for senior design students.”

One project involves finding better ways to power the electric fences ranchers build to protect their cattle. Because there is no source of electricity in the area, the fences run on car batteries, Greco said.

To recharge the batteries, people have to carry them into a town about a two-hour walk away, he said. An alternative would be to make a central solar-powered battery recharging center.

“It would be available for recharging batteries and available to the community,” Greco said.

Other projects include creating a better design for the wood-burning stoves used by the community, developing a hand-crank operated device to process food and improving the irrigation design.

Group members hope to return to Panama and see the results of some of their work, Greco said.

“We would like to make another follow-up visit and continue our relationship (with the communities),” Greco said.

Reach Joanna Allerhand at [email protected].