Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC) Director Megan Yoo Schneider, a registered professional engineer, recently made a series of presentations to water officials in South Korea.
Yoo Schneider, who was elected to the MWDOC board in November to represent District 7 in South Orange County, spent two weeks in Korea with her father, Lee Yoo, the Laboratory Director for the Orange County Water District.
Director Yoo Schneider’s schedule included presentations with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Waterworks, which treats and supplies water to Seoul, a city of some 10 million people. Orange County’s population is less than a third of that, at 3.1 million.
Yoo Schneider, who funded the trip personally, also had meetings and made presentations to KWater, a large governmental organization that helps develop and construct water-resources projects in South Korea, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, which performs a variety of groundbreaking water-research projects and the National Institute of Environmental Research.
“The meetings and presentations affirmed that we need to always look at the big picture,” Yoo Schneider said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to water supply and reliability.”
Yoo Schneider said the trip brought many lessons, but also affirmed that different conditions – such as the rich basin beneath North OC and the quick-moving shallow basin in South OC – require different approaches for solutions.