Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries recently won the Institute for International Education’s 2014 Andrew Heiskell Award for its program to bring clean water to the 10,000 residents of Cange, Haiti.
The system Clemson students designed has given Haiti’s Central Plateau its first chlorinated municipal water system and combats the spread of cholera. They partnered with the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina in 2009, which was already working to upgrade Cange’s 30-year-old water system.
In October 2012, students and villagers installed a pump to finish the system, which includes a new dam, a filtration building, six miles of piping, nine fountains, two new cisterns, and two reconditioned cisterns, which all house more than 200,000 gallons of water.
The Episcopal Church provided $1.5 million for the project in addition to the funds students raised and private donations and allocations from Creative Inquiry and the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering at Clemson.
So far, 375 students have participated, including eight interns who stayed in Haiti for seven months to a year.
