Vessel Convening · May 5, 2026

Global Lessons for
U.S. WASH

Bringing 25 years of international practice home — accountability, financing, and operating systems for closing the U.S. water access gap.

Evan Thomas

Professor, CU Boulder · Mortenson Center for Global Engineering & Resilience

CEO, Virridy

The Challenge

Water Quality Impairment at Scale

4B

People

drink microbially contaminated water

60%

of GDP

threatened by water insecurity

10%

of Emissions

half from water management, half from unmanaged human wastewater

50%

U.S. Rivers

fail Clean Water Act standards

Root cause: The gap persists because it's invisible, under-funded, and operationally orphaned — the same conditions the global WASH sector has spent 25 years learning to fix.

The Challenge · Global E. coli Data

10MObservations

180KSites

40Years

7Databases

Speaker · ~60s

Over the past four decades, regulators and researchers around the world have collected ten million E. coli observations across more than 180,000 monitoring sites. We compiled them from seven national and regional databases — the largest open archive of fecal-indicator bacteria data ever assembled.

Three things to take from it.

One — contamination is global. Every continent, every income level. The U.S. has as many red dots as any country.

Two — where the data exists, the pattern is the same: distributed sources, persistent risks. Diffuse, not point.

Three — and this is the part that matters most for Vessel: the underserved communities Vessel exists for are the blank parts of this map. Not because they're clean — because nobody has measured them. To close the U.S. water access gap, we have to fill those blanks in.

Pillar 1 · From Visibility to Accountability

Speaker · ~75s

This is what twenty-five years of global WASH has built — and what U.S. WASH is missing. A loop.

It starts at the top: monitoring. Distributed, real-time visibility into whether a water service is actually delivering. The data confirms outcomes — water delivered, contamination prevented, environmental restoration verified.

Verified outcomes unlock revenue: performance contracts, results-based finance, carbon credits. Money that arrives only when the service does. That revenue funds action — O&M, repairs, technicians on payroll. Not one-off grants.

Action sustains outcomes. Monitoring catches when it doesn't. The loop closes — and the family in the middle is the reason any of it happens.

U.S. WASH breaks this loop in three places: invisible monitoring, no outcome verification, unaccountable funding that pays whether the system works or not. Mark and Nieves are going to show what closing it looks like — bridging Peru and Arizona.

The Lume in Action

Seine River · Paris

Pastoralist Boreholes · Kenya

Field Testing · Boulder Creek

In-Situ Monitoring · Bridge Deployment

Speaker · ~75s

This is the Lume — an optical fluorescence sensor we built at CU Boulder and Virridy. Same sensor, four very different contexts.

Top-left: the Seine in Paris, monitoring recreational water quality for swimmers ahead of the 2024 Olympics. Top-right: a pastoralist borehole in Kenya — one of tens of thousands of rural water points we monitor across twelve countries serving 2.6 million people.

Bottom-left: Boulder Creek, where we're working with the City of Boulder, CDPHE, and EPA Region 8 toward Alternative Test Procedure approval — what would be the first U.S. regulatory-grade E. coli method born from international rural deployment. Bottom-right: in-situ on a bridge.

Same physics. Built where the constraints are hardest. Coming to where the standards are highest.

But sensors are only one piece. The real lessons are the systems around them — the financing, the regulation, the operating models. That's what the next two pillars are about.

Global Lessons forU.S. WASH

Water Quality Impairment at Scale

Global Lessons for
U.S. WASH