Addressing contemporary water challenges when the technical details are crucial but not enough

“I read a three part story about the water challenges of the 21st century in the New York Times when I was a junior in high school and was like, ‘I think I want to do that,’” says Margaret Garcia, an associate professor with ASU’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. 

Garcia had never met a civil engineer, but was undeterred. She entered her undergraduate training during a time when engineers were rapidly increasing their humanitarian efforts. Programs like Engineers Without Borders were starting chapters at campuses across the US, and Garcia quickly became an active member.

“I was involved in Engineers Without Borders for about a decade in many different roles,” says Garcia. “That was one of the things that really maintained my interest in civil engineering through those many classes of physics and differential equations that are all pretty abstract.”

From her time as an undergraduate to professional engineer to doctoral researcher, Garcia maintained her interest in humanitarian work. She participated in projects in Central and South America, specifically Honduras and Peru, primarily related to potable water storage, treatment and delivery.

“Relative to US infrastructure projects, these were not technically complex. They were gravity fed systems, spring box collection, some coarse filtration,” says Garcia. “The complexity was in the management and social dynamics.”

These experiences were some of the first, but not the last, where Garcia faced the reality that “engineering is essential and you need to get it right, but engineering alone is insufficient.” She says that she quickly learned a project would not be sustained if it did not have community support to fund and maintain it for the long term.

During her time with Arup, an engineering firm with a strong sustainability focus, she learned a similar lesson.

“I was finding that a lot of the technical engineering wasn't rocket science, it's following the code. But, sometimes we would have clients who came in with bigger ambitions in sustainability or climate change adaptation," says Garcia. "Then we were often bumping up against things like agency jurisdiction. It was clear once again that you have to get the technical details right, but it’s not enough. The question then became how we actually integrate some novel things into these mature infrastructure systems.”

That question led her to a doctoral program at Tufts focusing on water diplomacy. 

“The draw was the training framework that broadly recognized we need to get the physical science and the engineering right,” says Garcia, “but we also need to understand the social dynamics and the institutional structure to make progress on tough water problems.”

Today, Garcia leads a group with a diverse portfolio of water-related engineering projects. Her current focus is on improvements that can be made to mature water infrastructure – think of Hoover Dam built in the 1930’s and Glen Canyon Dam completed in the 1960’s – to contend with contemporary and future climate and socioeconomic conditions. 

“We are seeing aridification across the western US, and that's decreasing our mean water supply. It's also challenging our ability to identify when we're in or not in drought,” says Garcia. “Our infrastructure systems are so big and robust, they're actually successful at insulating us from environmental variability and so we don’t really see the consequences of change right away. But our buffers are getting smaller and smaller.”

Garcia sees opportunities to act in the margins, to make the changes that can be made now. For example, supported by the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative, she and her team are working on how to take advantage of wet years in Arizona’s Salt and Verde River system. The researchers are examining how to increase smaller scale water storage with on-farm flood irrigation that can recharge groundwater while also reducing flood risk on nearby roadways.  

“There are a lot of examples like that where improved science and technology can open some doors,” says Garcia. “It is not going to wholesale solve all of our problems in one go, but you can chip away, make some progress and build more of a buffer.”

Garcia is also tackling some of these challenges with what she calls “the basic science of what is working, what is not and why.” To that end, she and a group of colleagues have been working for many years to compare urban water supply in what started out as three cities – Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami – and how they are and aren’t adapting to environmental changes with new technologies and practices. 

Over time, the team expanded to compare 20 cities – including Phoenix – across the US. While the work is ongoing, they have found that the physical environment, infrastructure capacity and urban water supply management decision-making all play an important role in how a diverse array of cities are handling environmental impacts like increased flooding or drought.

Garcia is also looking at patterns of wet and dry years in the Colorado River Basin to help optimize how water users are able to flexibly store and withdraw water from across the river’s major reservoirs. 

“With the Drought Contingency Plan, there was a loosening of rules around when water rights holders could withdraw water from Lake Mead,” says Garcia. “This was to encourage water users to bank water to help the system, but it also creates a possible ‘bank run’ situation. We’re trying to better predict when hydrological conditions across the basin might lead many users to withdraw water at the same time and identify storage and operating rules that reduce that risk.”

In addition to her research, Garcia spends a lot of time with both undergraduate and graduate students, preparing them for the dynamic future that lays ahead. While teaching the basics of engineering, Garcia exposes students to sustainability concepts, as well as what they might do when they are faced with novel situations. 

“My students will go out and have clients who have a site that was flooded by a storm that's basically off the charts and doesn't map to a known frequency,” says Garcia. “That's true for heat, for extreme precipitation, for drought. It’s no longer just about the future, engineers are actively facing these situations right now. I try to get students to think about how they apply core concepts of hydrology to these new challenges so they aren’t surprised when the design guidelines no longer apply.” 

With an approach that values both technical rigor and socioeconomic complexity, Garcia is helping to make improvements to water infrastructure and training others to do the same, addressing some of the very problems that compelled her to become an engineer in the first place.

Climate change Colorado River Management Research Water supply