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by Steve Ricci
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long the labyrinthine halls of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a warren of laboratories houses some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated scientific equipment. In the lab of Susan Murcott ’70, however, visitors are more likely to find equipment no more complex than might be found in a high school chemistry class: glass jars, clay pots, spigots, buckets, jugs, plastic tubing, empty soda bottles, strainers, and containers of varying sizes and shapes.
Although her accoutrements may be low-tech when compared to those of her colleagues, they are no less ingenious and her work is no less notable. For six years, Murcott, an MIT research engineer, principal investigator, and consultant, has been leading projects designed to bring inexpensive water purification to underdeveloped regions in countries such as Brazil, Haiti, and Nepal. Impoverished people in areas such as these are part of the more than one billion people who lack access to safe drinking water, a crisis that Murcott says can be solved with simple solutions. The first step, she says, is for someone to care enough to do something about it.
“The billion of us who live in wealth have a responsibility to recognize that we are one global family,” she said. “Would you let one in four of your children or family members drink polluted water and watch children die? There are more people in the world, most of them children, who die from waterborne diseases than die from AIDS. In 2003, 3 million people died from AIDS, 3.4 million are dying each year from water-related diseases.”
Murcott’s challenge—to provide effective water purification techniques and supplies that are easy to use and also affordable for people who may be poor and uneducated—is one for which she is well-suited. Although her early education did not heavily emphasize science, the desire to help others and effect change in the world have always been her strongest passions.
A Huntington, Long Island, native, Murcott left public school and came to Emma Willard School for her sophomore year in 1968, having first visited several other private schools. “I liked Emma Willard right away,” she remembers. “As soon as I saw it I said, ‘This is the place for me.’ It really was an ideal school for me. I was able to flourish in very positive ways at Emma Willard.”
Murcott attended Emma Willard during a turbulent era in America, one marked by great social and political upheaval. The war in Vietnam and increasingly violent protests at college campuses across the country affected her deeply and imbued her with the same sense of commitment to change that many other young people were experiencing at the time.
Although she took the required curriculum while at Emma Willard, she was less interested in science and math than in the humanities, music, and liberal arts. “Everybody from my class went on to college, but I specifically chose not to,” she said. “I wanted to go to Vietnam to do good, in this sort of idealistic young person’s way. I was against the war and in favor of the peace movement.” While her classmates were busy studying to get into Ivy League universities, Murcott was trying to devise a plan to go to Vietnam. Although her parents didn’t openly object to her efforts, she still encountered many obstacles. “I kept hitting walls,” she remembers. “I didn’t want to join the service or become a nurse, but there weren’t many other options for someone who was only 17 years old.”
During this time, Murcott attended a conference of social workers in New York City. The keynote speaker was the renowned anthropologist, Margaret Mead, an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam. After the conference, Murcott approached Mead and told her of her plans. “She told me in a very maternal and stern way, ‘Young lady, if you want to do good for the people of Vietnam, stop the war in this country.’ ” Murcott took the advice and began working as a peace activist in the year after she graduated from Emma Willard.
A year later she joined the first class of women at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and lived in Japan for a year through one of the college’s programs. She left Williams before graduating and in the ensuing years hiked the Appalachian Trail, taught classes for Outward Bound, and lived in Australia and Hawaii. During her travels she developed an interest in Zen and Buddhist philosophy, and a book she wrote during this time—The First Buddhist Women—was published by Parallax Press in 1991. The book, a contemporary translation and commentary on the verses written by the first female disciples of Buddha, explores Buddhism’s liberal attitudes toward women since its founding.
After her travels, she decided her life needed to take a more practical turn. “The heyday of the ’60s and ’70s was over. All my friends had gotten married and earned their PhDs, and I was essentially a dropout. I had many interesting abilities: wilderness experience, political skills, writing skills, but I realized I needed more practical skills.” It was then that she met her husband, Ralph Coffman, at Harvard University while doing reference checks for her book. He inspired her to continue her education and she got her undergraduate degree in English literature at Wellesley College, and then pursued a joint-degree program at MIT in engineering.
During her studies, one of her favorite subjects was geology. She asked her professor about career options in the field and was told there were essentially three options. “I said no to petrochemicals, I said no to mining, I said yes to water,” she says. She began hydrology studies at MIT and received her master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering in 1992, after completing her graduate thesis on innovative wastewater treatment. As a student, she was greatly inspired by her professor, Donald Harleman, Ford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (currently emeritus), whom she says was instrumental in helping her achieve success. “He was my advisor, my mentor, and my champion; without him, none of what I’ve done would be possible,” Murcott said. “If I had one piece of advice to offer young women going into science it would be to find a mentor.”
After she graduated, Murcott continued working with Harleman as a consultant on innovations in municipal wastewater treatment in American cities and around the world, refining systems that had been around for decades and boosting the performance of treatment plants. In introducing this technique to plants at major cities, Murcott has had the opportunity to visit and work in places such as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Budapest, Hong Kong, and numerous small cities in Eastern Europe and Brazil—areas that had little or no wastewater treatment services prior to her work.
In 1997 Murcott began her first drinking water project in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Some friends who are medical doctors were working at a village of about 3,000 people in the north part of the country. The doctors were helping a medical clinic with its record-keeping practices when they noted that three-quarters of the people in the village were visiting the clinic because of health problems caused by water-borne diseases. “The doctors realized that they didn’t need to bring in another doctor, they needed to bring in an engineer,” she said.
The villagers, she discovered, were getting water from surface sources and from dug wells, tube wells, rainwater collection, and from oxcarts that delivered water from a distant river. Murcott set up a water-testing lab to evaluate the water sources in the area and local engineers were then brought in to implement the treatment systems that she had proposed. “I liked that work very much,” she said, “because I was working directly with the villagers who were affected by the problems that I was investigating. When I worked in the big cities on large municipal projects, I was working with Western-trained engineers, but when I was working with the actual people who were affected by the water problems, that was a revelation. It was really meaningful for me.”
In 1998, Murcott was invited to attend the Second International Women and Water Conference in Katmandu, Nepal. Located on the southern slopes of the Himalayan Mountains in south central Asia, the kingdom of Nepal is one of the poorest nations in the world. Approximately 88 percent of the population lives in remote, rural villages in the hills. The country’s infrastructure for supplying clean water—in both rural and urban areas—is minima compared to that of industrialized countries, leaving citizens to treat their own water if they realize the need to do so and can afford to. Most of the population relies on decentralized water supply systems such as open wells, springs, and stone taps connected to local reservoirs. It was there that Murcott first saw the impact that poor access to safe water was having on this population, particularly among the women. She was approached by many local women who pleaded with her for a solution to their water problems.
“That conference was a great privilege and a life-shaping event for me,” Murcott said. “In developing countries like Nepal, it’s women who are often the ones doing the work with water; they are the ones collecting it and carrying it for long distances.”
According to one MIT study cited in the department’s newsletter, Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT (July 2003), women in Nepal can spend up to five hours a day carrying 15kg (33 pounds) of water. If the water isn’t already contaminated at the source, it often becomes contaminated during transit and storage. Once ingested by children, the tainted water leads to illness, adding a further burden to the women who have to care for the children. In Nepal, one out of 10 children under age five—about 44,000—dies each year from waterborne diseases.
Murcott returned to Massachusetts with a mission. In her position at MIT, she is responsible for supervising master’s thesis projects for engineering students. Though student projects had traditionally been conducted locally, Murcott and Harleman introduced into the program the concept of conducting international projects in developing countries. In 1999, under the direction of senior research engineer Eric Adams, PhD, director of the department’s master’s program in engineering at MIT, they introduced the first drinking water project in Nepal.
“Susan has helped students participate in a facet of engineering they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do here,” Adams says. “MIT is a research institution and there aren’t too many people doing research at this level that is as concerned with social change and the introduction of appropriate technologies. These projects allow students to work on something more interesting and more socially relevant than they might otherwise. It’s one thing to talk about engineering in the classroom and it’s another thing to go and see the people who are using it and are affected by it.”
Traveling to Nepal during the school’s month-long winter break and field research period in January, Murcott and her students introduced point-of-use household water filtration systems, designed to be used at the stage where the water is about to be consumed. Purification must include two components: the removal of particulates and the removal or disinfection of harmful microorganisms. Murcott and her team used various methods to achieve their goal:
The intent of the projects is basic, Murcott says: provide simple, inexpensive, localy available household treatment systems. “Basically we’ve tried to create sustainable technologies with local materials, that are low-cost and socially acceptable.” The typical price of these systems (in U.S. dollars) can range from about $25 to as little as $.50. An arsenic-biosand filter designed by Tommy Ngai, a former member of Murcott’s team, recently won an award in the water and sanitation category of the World Bank Development Marketplace Global Competition 2003. The filter removes both arsenic and pathogens simultaneously.
For six years, the projects have made substantial progress, and rates of illness have dropped significantly. Murcott plans to continue the projects and expand them to other areas in need. In January 2004, she traveled with a team of students to Peru to implement similar systems among villages there.
After a lifetime of exploration and activism, she says she has reached a point where she is combining her eclectic skills to help large numbers of people and derives great satisfaction from her work. “I’ve been very blessed in my life with health, wealth, family, and happiness,” she said. “I feel as though the kind of well being I’ve had is not available to large numbers of people in the world. We need to recognize that there are many people suffering.”
This Serving & Shaping column appeared in the winter 2004 issue of EMMA.
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