Rice University Engineers Without Borders

El Salvador Water Project

For the past three years, the El Salvador team has worked on projects in the municipality of San Jose Villanueva, located an hour outside the capital, San Salvador. In the community, seven hundred people rely on a single groundwater spring for their drinking, washing, bathing, and domestic use water needs. The spring water is highly contaminated with fecal bacteria, and community members often wait for more than an hour in order to wash their clothes on a nearby rock, bathe in the open, or obtain drinking water to haul back to their houses. After an exploratory trip and a survey trip, the El Salvador team decided to focus their efforts on designing and constructing a water storage, distribution, and purification system. In January of 2005, the team constructed a 40,000 liter reinforced concrete cinder block water storage tank, seven washing stations, three drinking water taps, and a semi-private bathing area. The community is overjoyed with the project and usage has increased and wait times have been drastically lowered. The team is returning in January of 2006 to implement a solar powered lighting system and to work with the community to implement in home water filtration and disinfection units with the help of an organization called Potters for Peace. The El Salvador team is in the process of finding a new large scale project to work on for the next three years.

El Salvador
Project

Mexico
Project

Nicaragua 1
Project

Nicaragua 2
Project

Organizational Structure

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