The Community Engineering Corps completed its first drinking water project by helping a South Dakota residential subdivision figure out ways to improve its water supply, which regularly exceeds state and federal standards for total radium and gross alpha particles.

Cedar Gulch II has 10 homes, 27 residents – and drinking water that contains five times more radium than the maximum contaminant level set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

CEC recommended water quality improvements.“This is a small community in rural South Dakota. They would never have the resources to go out and locate a qualified engineering consulting company that they could afford. So this was right in line with what the Community Engineering Corps is supposed to be,” says Jim Malley, chair of AWWA’s Technical and Education Council and a member of the project’s Technical Review Committee.

(Learn more about the Community Engineering Corps and volunteer opportunities.)

In the case of Cedar Gulch, the project team consisted of engineers from Engineers Without Borders-USA’s (EWB-USA) Northern Virginia Professional Chapter. They studied the subdivision’s source of drinking water – a 2,500-foot-deep well located on a neighboring ranch.

(Read "Engineers Without Borders-USA: Taking on the Toughest Challenges.")

During the project, the CECorps team partnered with an EWB-USA chapter of students from South Dakota State University to provide mentorship and guidance for their capstone project design course. Five students made a field trip to Cedar Gulch, took photos of the community and water and wastewater systems, and worked with the project team on an alternatives analysis.

CECorps engineers focused on six possible solutions: point-of-entry, point-of-use treatment using the subdivision’s existing well, centralizing treatment with the existing well, partnering with a nearby subdivision to use their well, partnering with the neighboring subdivision to use their well and the Cedar Gulch II lagoon, installing a new well, and connecting to the Rapid City, S.D., water supply.

Ultimately, the project team focused on one alternative, which happened to be the least expensive: district-managed, point-of-entry, point-of-use drinking water treatment units, using the Cedar Gulch well water with in-home water softeners and ion exchange technologies. more