UNH leads Asian officials on tour of local water facilities

Cambodian and Vietnamese visitors learn from state and private industry

Environmental officials from Cambodia and Vietnam toured New Hampshire water facilities recently—seeing the impacts of flooding first hand —as part of a University of New Hampshire-led effort to help cities in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) clean up their water.

Ang Chiek, Deputy Director of Phnom Penh's Department of Environment tests a water sample from the Lamprey River with a handheld device used by NHDES' Volunteer River Assessment Program as delegates from Viet Nam look on.

Planned since last October, the visit by officials from Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Quang Ninh province in Viet Nam coincided with some of the worst flooding in New Hampshire’s history. “The topic is water and we’re getting lot’s of it here. This is a good example of a non-point source,” Ihab Farag, UNH professor of chemical engineering, told the group on May 16, as he welcomed them to a soggy New Hampshire.

During their visit, the officials heard presentations from UNH, state government and private officials. Fay Rubin, of the UNH Complex Systems Research Center explained how geographic information system (GIS) mapping can be used to help manage water data. Ted Walsh, of the N.H. Department of Environmental Services, demonstrated the water monitoring equipment used in the department’s Volunteer River Assessment Program, giving the officials a chance to test samples from the swollen Lamprey River for themselves. Research Associate Professor Steve Jones gave a tour of UNH’s Jackson Estuarine Lab and took the visitors out on Great and Little Bays so they could see how the lab samples water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Coastal Assessment project.

“We have a lot of industry in Phnom Penh now, but we don’t have a central treatment plant. Everything discharges directly in the river, so we are very worried because the on-site treatment at the factories is not good yet,” said Ang Chiek, deputy director of the city’s Department of the Environment. “We would like to cooperate with New Hampshire in a pilot project for the treatment of wastewater along the Mekong River.”

During their weeklong visit, the officials also toured aquaculture farms along the seacoast, the Durham Wastewater Treatment Plant and the Manchester Water Works. They also signed memorandum of agreements with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.

“We hope all the experiences we have in New Hampshire will be applied effectively somehow in Vietnam,” said Dai Danh Phung, director of Quang Ninh’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, through an interpreter. “Geographically, we have a lot of similarities to New Hampshire.”

The workshop, which is part of ASEAN’s Environmentally Sustainable Cities Initiative, was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Council of State Governments. UNH’s partners included NHDES and the N.H. Department of Resources and Economic Development’s Office of International Commerce.

Last fall, Farag led a team of state government experts to Vietnam and Cambodia, meeting with top government officials in both countries. “All the officials that I met were very supportive of our joint efforts,” said Farag. “They feel that this project is very important and timely for their progress both environmentally and economically. They are anxious to learn from our experience and success in New Hampshire.”