Jack has won the East of England round of the annual Institution of Civil Engineers Graduate and Student Papers Competition. His winning paper was about his experience on a project to assess the state of water supplies in Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, recovering from years of civil war.
The conflict has left many wells, pumps and other sources of water unusable. The World Bank has funded a unicef initiative to locate and assess all the country’s useable water supplies. Known as Water Point Mapping there is concern it does not provide information on the quality of the water
and whether it is fit for human consumption. Jack was part of a team from Edinburgh University to locate and grade wells. The research is a shared collaboration between the University and Concern Worldwide and was funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund.
“The challenge is defining functionality of a well and how to measure it. Water Point Mapping just tells you where there is a source not if it’s any good.” said Jack.
Further information about the on-going project is available on the Sierra Leone Water Project : Water Blog. His winning paper is titled: ‘Assessing the functionality of rural hand pump wells in Sierra Leone using Water Point Mapping.’
Jack will go forward to the next round with the aim of winning a place in the ICE International Papers Competition later this year. He is a Water Engineering Consultant with Mott MacDonald in Cambridge and will be studying the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the Cambridge University from October 2013.
Runner up was Daniel Buxton, a colleague of Jack at Mott Macdonald who received £150 for his paper titled: 'The Carbon Challenge; Decreasing Embodied Carbon by 50% on a Major Water Infrastructure Project'. The paper was about reducing carbon in an Anglian Water project to increase water supplies in Lincolnshire.
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