North students work locally and act globally

Dr. Chuck Henry, a fun-natured McNary High School grad who has two engineering degrees from Oregon State University, intended to make an end product for developing nations so native citizens could have a little dignity when performing the bodily functions that Americans have been taking for granted since the outhouse came indoors.

The former professor of environmental science and sustainability at the University of Washington in Seattle, knew that in many countries such as the Republic of Ghana, children could urinate just about anywhere outside, but there was no place for them to, ahem, eliminate solid waste safely and discreetly indoors.

So he set out to create the Earth Auger, a Royal-Scot blue composting toilet that diverts urine and mixes solid waste with other organic material such as coffee grounds or sawdust, and augers it into a rich, all natural fertilizer all without water, odor or insects.

Henry founded a company called Critical Practices, and with the help of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant, he's building and shipping toilets to remote villages across the globe and changing the lives of people in need throughout the world.

He's also involving students from North Salem High School in the process, working with his sister, Barb Narkaus, an art teacher at North, as well as R.J. Hampton, who teaches engineering-design and computer-integrated manufacturing classes at the high school. Henry has visited the classroom and is looking to have the students assemble the Earth Auger toilet as well as create a video to help people in foreign countries understand how the composting toilet works.

Henry even envisions local students helping him learn how to make the waterless toilet more quickly and economically.

As excited and eager to help people in places like Senegal in West Africa as Henry was, he has almost been more surprised and amazed by a turn of events that has lead to a new use for his Earth Auger: It has now been embraced by residents throughout the United States for its disaster-preparedness usefulness.

And much of its disaster-preparedness popularity started right here in Salem with a little help from his brother-in-law Steve Narkaus, a geologist by education and one of the owners of Elsinore Framing & Fine Art Gallery. Married to Barb, who is another of the gallery's owners as well as teaching art, Steve is a Certified Emergency Management Team member in the community, and an active participant in an Illahe neighborhood preparedness group.

Steve and Barb had been reading the Think Big earthquake series in the Statesman Journal and preparing for a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. Steve said the idea was staring them in the face.

"My brother-in-law's composting toilet could be used if a lack of water and raw sewage became a problem in a major disaster like the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake," Steve said. "It requires no water and no chemicals. There are other portable toilets out there but they need lots of water and chemicals, and there has to be a dump site. We brought one to one of our disaster-preparedness meetings and people were ordering them without hesitation."

So the couple and Henry talked, and they are now in the process of forming a company to produce more of the composting toilets, and they're looking to involve more North students through the school district's new Career Technical Education Center (CTEC) high school. Barb plans to use a Salem-Education Foundation Grant to produce, along with her students, a documentary that can be put on video to show how to assemble the toilet and how to use it.

"We have to be conscious of the fact in some of these developing nations there is no electricity to power laptops and show videos," Henry said. "But here in the U.S. that won't be an issue."

Henry said his composting toilet, while designed to be a temporary solution, makes sense in a disaster because if the toilets are kept oxygenated, they won't smell or attract flies, which breed and spread disease. Henry uses one in his own home in Washington state, and he's not even bivouacking.

The trio hope to make inroads with city and county emergency managers and offer the toilets as a community system. Henry said the toilets can be loaded onto a trailer with multiple stalls for municipal and state use in the event of a disaster on the scale of a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. There are set-ups to accommodate 200 or more toilets.

Barb is confident that with Hampton's engineering background and connection with chemistry teachers at North, they could make any modifications a city, county or state manager might require, and the students could help execute those modifications.

Henry doesn't see a shift in focus as derailing him from his original purpose.

"If we can sell these toilets for less than $1,000 each in the United States, I can put that money back into getting them made for places like the flood zones of Senegal," Henry said. "And I can create microfinancing to provide loans to citizens to put in sanitation in places that don't have it now.

"This was really designed to help people in developing nations, but after Steve and Barb showed me their ideas, I know it can have local purpose as well, and I'm delighted to have the young students along for the learning process" Henry said.

ccurrie@statesmanjournal.com; 503-399-6746 or follow on Twitter at @CATMCurrie