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The Water Crisis and Engineering

The Water Crisis

Every morning I wake up, shuffle half conscious to the bathroom, and wash my face and brush my teeth in the sink. It is instinct. I have never woken up, and been worried about whether or not the water was going to run, and whether or not it would be safe to use. Something we all tend to take for granted, living in the United states, is the easy access we have to clean water. Contarry, around the world, people do not have the privilege of easy access to clean water. NAtional Geographic has a variety of shokcing statistics that emphasize the crisis we have at hand. Nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water. However, only 2.5 percent of that is fresh. Of that freshwater, only 1 percent is accessible. The rest in glaciers and snowfields. Mathematically, that means only .007 percent of the worlds water canbe used by people [4]. It may not look like we have a water shortage, but everything is not what it seems.

This shortage has a major ipact on the daily lives of individuals all around the worl.d Water.org puts all of this into perspective, with constantly changing numbers regarding how many people are affected by this issue. Currently, 844 million people are living without access to clean water. All those people, having to go thorugh their daily routine without water. This can cause a domino effect of problems in education, work opportunities, and health care. Children are forced time away from their education in order to travel far distances to collect water. Water is directly proportional to sanitation, and without sanitation, diseases spread quicker and are harder to treat. Women are forced to, instead of getting a job, spend their days trying to find water for their familieiss. "1 in 9 people lack access to safe water" [6]. This is a widespread crisis affectng a multitude of people.

Why I Want Help

It has always been a goal of mine to be able to have a career in which I couold help people born into unfavorable circumstances. Nobody can control how, when, and in what environment they are born in. I have always found it baffling that I could be born into such a privilidged environment, and others not so much. I have never worried about where my next meal would come from, or if I would have water to use. I find it intriguing that a career in engineering could lead to developing innovations to help people gain access to clean water. "By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of thw rolds population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change" [4]. It is

Sources

• [1] D. Chandler. "Water, Water Everywhere... even in the air" MIT News. 04.14.2017. Accessed 10.20.2017. http://news.mit.edu/2017/mof-device-harvests-fresh
• [2]D. Chandler. "Fog Harvesting: How To Get Fresh water out of thin air" Phys.org. 08.30.2013. Accessed 10.20.2017.
• [3] J. Prisco. "Desert Fog Catchers Make Water Out of Thin Air." CNN. 11.18.2016. Accessed 10.20.2017.
• [4] "Freshwater Crisis." National Geographic Society. 2017. Accessed 10.20.2017.
• [5] S. Czechofsky. "Fog Catchers in Morocco." Technical Univeristy of Munich. 03.2015. Accessed 10.20.2017.
• [6] "The Water Crisis." Water.org. 2017. Accessed 10.20.2017.