Lynchburg Business

Local “Engineers Without Borders” Test the Limits in Bolivia

Issue: February 2010 by Aaron Lee in Architecture, Engineering & Construction, Inside The Magazine

There’s a classic scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” where Robert Redford steps off a train in Bolivia, silently surveys a rural, arid landscape for the first time in his life…and then throws a fit.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha…Bolivia!” Redford heckles.

In Lynchburg, there’s a newly-formed chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) who—if they hadn’t had Google—would have known about as much as the Kid did about that particular South American country before flying there in October. Although, unlike the Kid, the EWB crew made it back to the States alive and carrying a fond impression of a country that both wowed and wounded them in less than a week’s time.
The idea for the Bolivia trip started with Dan Sutton, a civil engineer at Wiley|Wilson, when he floated a company-wide email in late 2008 about forming a local EWB chapter. Basically, EWB’s mission is to draw volunteer engineering know-how from developed nations into undeveloped ones. In the Lynchburg chapter’s case, it was exactly a year to the day after that first email that Sutton and two other local engineers landed in El Alto, just outside the Bolivian capital of La Paz.
“It didn’t seem that quick,” Sutton said, remembering the initial email.

In fact, the time between passed slowly because it took months to find a project that was fitting for a group of first-timers to tackle. And when they finally settled on Bolivia, they had to find the money to get there and then had to imagine a work plan for a place none of them had ever seen; a plan that was canned almost immediately after meeting higher-ups in the roughly 70-family village of Pampoyo and realizing that the approximately 260 feet of irrigation they had originally thought needed repairing had, in fact, been fixed.

Instead, what the village really needed was a way to route a natural spring, which lies 2.5 miles up a mountain from Pampoyo, around a couple of contaminated obstacles—including mine run off—and into the farming fields that lay halfway between that spring and the village.
“It’s different than what we expected, but it can be done,” Dave Nardi, a mechanical engineer with Wiley|Wilson, said of the group’s mentality after the village meeting.
The crew knew immediately that they didn’t have the time or the people—even with the one other Bolivia-based engineer working with them on the project—to make a dent in the surveying that was needed. But, as guides and promising laborers, the villagers gave the project confidence.
“There’s just so many times they showed their hearts were in it,” Nardi said of the villagers, who will lay the piping after a cistern for collecting the spring and the final pipe route have been established.

Nardi hopes they will begin work on that by next summer. Currently, the village irrigates its fields with water from a stream that is polluted. (Note: The village does get its drinking water from an unpolluted natural spring.) The EWB crew estimates the new irrigation will quadruple the amount of water currently available from combining the average rainfall and what is drawn off the polluted stream.
In the end, the result is impressive for the EWB crew who switched their script 180 degrees over three days in Pampoyo. And while their work probably merited some chill time to absorb the change, the trip back to La Paz slammed the breaks on any relaxation when the Toyota Land Cruiser the crew was riding in flipped two or three times into oncoming traffic after losing control while passing a tractor trailer. No one was killed, but Ryan Knapp, a mechanical engineer with Georgia Pacific, took the worst of the wreck with a laceration to the head. He was taken an hour away to the hospital, accompanied by the group’s translator, who suffered bruising and a few busted ribs.

Meanwhile, Sutton and Nardi—who both walked away mostly unscathed—stayed with the vehicle as Knapp and the others went to the hospital; watching as a police officer lit fire to a nearby brush as a flare warning to traffic. There, they waited for a ride back to La Paz, where a plan to enjoy the city was replaced with boarding a plane for home a short time later.

Today, the group’s roughly 10 active members are planning the second phase of what will ultimately take two more trips to Bolivia to fully implement, according to Nardi and Sutton. Their plan is to return this summer. This time, their hope is not only to help finalize the route they started to the natural spring, but also to return home with a few less scars to remind them of the trip.

To learn more about the local chapter of EWB, please visit www.blueridge-ewb.org.