Vikram Kapoor, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant from the National Science Foundation to research microbial contaminants along smaller towns in southeast and lower central Texas waterways following Category 4 Hurricane Harvey. The storm, which made landfall in Texas in late August, caused unprecedented damage to wastewater infrastructure, leading to 2 million pounds of contaminants to be released into the environment. More than 800 wastewater treatment plants reported spills and several oil refineries and chemical plants, along with a dozen toxic waste sites, were flooded or damaged.
“The research will provide urgent and critical information on microbiological water quality in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” said Kapoor. “This project will directly impact multiple sectors of the water protection community like recreational-water monitoring, drinking-water utilities, and beach closures/advisories by providing them with better means to identify fecal sources, evaluate human health risk, and implement remediation strategies.”
RAPID grants are awarded to research proposals focusing on projects with severe urgency regarding quick-response research on natural disasters. Kapoor was awarded $79,277 to study the mobilization and transport of microbial contaminants along Texas waterways, and he began his research in early September, just one week after Harvey made landfall.
“Our research seeks to understand the extent of wastewater releases during Hurricane Harvey and monitor human exposure to pathogens,” Kapoor said. “We will test the hypothesis that sewage overflows and storm water runoff from Harvey have released high levels of potentially pathogenic organisms into Texas waterways. These circumstances pose a serious risk to human and environmental health via waterborne disease outbreaks, deterioration of recreational and drinking water quality, and degradation of aquatic ecology. This could cause some dreadful long-term effects on Texas, which now with the help of this RAPID grant, my team and I will have the opportunity to study.”
Kapoor’s team consists of environmental engineering Ph.D. student Duc Phan, environmental engineering graduate students Indrani Gupta and Tanvir Pasha, and geology undergraduate student Adrianne Lopez.
The release of these contaminants can pose a threat to humans in the areas affected by the storm, as seen by the two cases of bacteria-related infections that were traced back to the floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey, one of which ended in the death of a 77-year-old Kingwood woman.
“Our research looks to build a predictive framework for assessing wastewater contamination following severe flooding,” said Kapoor. “The information attained from this project will give the science community a deeper understanding of the transportation of pathogens that are released after flash floods, and hopefully this will lead the country to be better prepared for a future catastrophic event.”
One of the pathogens Kapoor will be monitoring in his research is called Vibrio vulnificus, which lives in the Gulf Coast waters and kills 1 in 7 people it comes in contact with. This pathogen can lead to necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating disease that can be deadly.
“Our team will evaluate the presence, abundance, and fate of fecal indicator bacteria, human mitochondrial DNA, and selected human pathogens, like Vibrio spp., in flood-impacted surface waters,” said Kapoor. “This will lead to better understanding of fecal source tracking as well as the use of human mtDNA as a direct measure to identifying sources of fecal contamination.”