Sustainable Water Development for the Village of Miramar, Honduras

The UNM Water Resources Program (WRP) offers the Master of Water Resources (MWR) degree, an interdisciplinary professional degree designed to prepare students for careers in water resources. The program seeks to expand and deepen students knowledge of their primary disciplines and, at the same time, improve their capacity to think carefully and comprehensively, and develop their technical and communication skills. In order to help achieve this goal, the WRP has developed three interdisciplinary (core) courses, the last of these courses (WR 573) being designed as a capstone, representing a culmination of the student\u27s experience in the program. This final class is an intensive field-based course in which the students work together using their previous coursework and acquired skills. A specific field project is undertaken, and students work through problem identification and definition, collect/analyze data, propose solutions, and present conclusions and recommendations in an appropriate forum. This year, the WR 573 class spent 12 days in Honduras examining rural water issues and assisting in the construction of a gravity-flow system to provide potable water to a local village (Miramar). Our involvement was to aid in the physical construction of the system, as well as examine and critique the construct of the system itself. This paper represents a summary of our experience in Honduras, our examination and assessment of the water problems in Miramar, including both a watershed sustainability assessment and an assessment of their proposed water delivery system.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/wr_fmr/1005/thumbnail.jp