Concepcion Water Treatment Project

Concepcion is a small town of about 9,000 indigenous folks who are living in the Chiquitano Forest area of eastern Bolivia which is about the size of Florida. It is located about 130 miles east of Santa Cruz it takes about 6 hours to get there over dirt roads through a beautiful dry tropical forest known as the Chiquitano Dry Forest which is one of the largest tropical dry forests in the world. The town of Concepcion has built a small reservoir lake that provides sufficient water but its water is untreated and contaminated by animals and humans.

In 2005 “Water for Humanity” (WFH) from Toronto, Canada got in contact with Rotarian Stan Rosholt from Rotary Club Amboró and Rotarian Hermes Justiniano from Rotary Club Santa Cruz in Bolivia. Water for Humanity (WFH) is a coalition of Canadian rotary clubs that are in an alliance with General Electric Water Process and Technologies Center from Canada. In the recent past WFH completed a very successful $750,000 water filtration plant in Tzaneen, Africa and at the time they were exploring for a new water projects in South America and Africa since their first project was so successful and they had the possibility for the donation of 5 more filtration plants for developing countries in need.

At the time Rotarian Stan Rosholt was studying in the US and Hermes Justiniano was working as the Executive Director to the Chiquitano Forest Conservation Foundation (FCBC- Fundacion para la Conservacion del Bosque Chiquitano). This conservation foundation is implementing a $1.5 million dollar per year land use planning and conservation projects in the Chiquitania region financed by the European Union. Together, working with regional authorities, they determined that Concepcion as the best match for a future water filtration project. (Stan later returned to Bolivia and works for FCBC.)

Both Rotarians working at FCBC on the Concepcion Water Filtration Project have overcome many obstacles on the way: some simple, some complex and technical. These included the size, the development of a modular design which can be added to as the town grows, the handling, use and disposal of toxic chemicals used for treatment and the relocation of an intake valve. Through it all, Stan and Hermes with support from the FCBC foundation kept plugging away. It all appeared to be moving forward after the initial onsite visit by representatives of the Water For Humanity Committee, but by the end of 2008 when the world economy tanked the project came to a standstill. Water for Humanity continues to wait for GE to approve the future project and send down a team of engineers to Bolivia to start developing the engineering designs in coordination with locals.

In an effort to restart the project, FCBC got in contact with us (EIA) to request for help in the engineering design and costs of this project. Although it seems GE is willing to donate the water filtration plant and the Rotarians will leverage their funding, that funding is earmarked for the implementation of the project which will include the costs and salaries of an engineer overseeing the construction phase. The problem is that there is no funding to send an (expensive) team of engineers to Bolivia from Canada to do the time consuming and painstaking work of taking measurements; designing the water pipe system for the urban area; analyzing a possible 2-pipe system; design and locate the water filtration platform and possibly designing a building where the filtration plant will be located. Then costing all the materials and labor and adjusting their designs to Bolivian water codes could become a big challenge.

In summary, the project is stuck. The potential donation is there but it can’t go forward until those designs are done. This could take a long time or it may never get moving without EIA stepping in to help complete the project. EIA was created exactly for this purpose: “to facilitate sustaining partnerships between engineering organizations and communities in need”. Once the preliminary design work is done, EIA engineers can collaborate with GE engineers in developing and costing the final project designs. In addition, EIA may provide the engineer for the construction phase (with funding from Canada) and we may even decide to include EWB chapters to help in construction.

We have a young, soon to graduate, Civil Engineering student called Marcos Robison whom is very interested in doing this project (see article elsewhere). He is eager to take on this project and is willing to do it for no salary as part of his thesis dissertation that he needs to finish for his graduation as a civil engineer. He hopes that this could convert into a full-time job once the construction begins. All he needs is the money to travel to Concepcion, several times, and a per diem to cover his expenses.

And that is where YOU come into the picture! If we can raise $500 in the next two weeks we can send Marcos to Concepcion and he can begin to do a site assessment. We will then need to raise some additional money, no more than $2000, for him to finish the project design.

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Background: Marcos Robison

Marcos Robison is a young student at the Catholic University in La Paz. Marcos is, what David may call, an ‘Anglo-Bolivian’. David knows Marcos’ parents who are North American Methodist missionaries working with the Andean Rural Health organization. Marcos is thoroughly Bolivian having been born and raised in La Paz.

Marcos is in the last semester of his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and beginning his senior project which we hope will be with EIA on the Water Filtration Project in Concepcion. He did his internship with EPSAS, the local water works company for La Paz. He worked in the infrastructure department, but like most interns mostly did secretarial work and filling out forms. He started out in structural engineering but became very interested in hydrology and is an ideal candidate to make this project happen. Marcos also has a lot of experience with EWB having served as a translator for many EWB groups over the last several years.

Marcos plans to take a couple of years off from school, working (hopefully) for us in Concepcion and then to returning to school to work on his Masters. Dr. Mamani, Mike Keyse, and David Stephenson are quite excited about the possibility of adding this young man to our team.