Engineers Without Borders USA - Sonoma County Professional Chapter

07/16/2025

This year's Engineers Without Borders Sonoma County Co****le tournament fundraiser is coming up this month on July 26th. Contact us at [email protected] if you're interested or would like more info or would like to support us!

07/15/2025

Please help support our work! This Wednesday July 16th from 4-7 PM enjoy a pint at the Rincon Valley Tap Room Bottle Shop (4927 Sonoma Hwy in Santa Rosa) and part of the proceeds for every purchase are being donated to benefit the work of our Sonoma County Engineers Without Borders chapter. Hope to see you there!

02/06/2025

We've just created a rough version of a time-lapse video that shows the construction of our recent Vista Alegre drinking water system. It condenses 3 weeks of work into 4.5 minutes! It's a rough version with no audio, etc. but wanted to share it!
You can find both regular and accelerated versions of the video on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9_6GD4Lwl8

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMPM8v30oHe2DqYHsGykSvdBRUmHeYmR_

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9_6GD4Lwl8

This is a time-lapse video of Sonoma County Engineers Without Borders, Amazon Promise, and the village of Vista Alegre building a rainwater catchment water s...

12/03/2024

Hi Friends of Engineers Without Borders,

For this year’s Giving Tuesday, please consider supporting your local Engineers Without Borders - Sonoma County Professional Chapter!

We are a group of local volunteer engineers who do local and international charitable projects. The low-cost drinking water systems we’ve been building in Amazon villages in Peru over the past decade have made amazing health improvements for these communities.

If you've been following our page, you are probably aware that we just completed another successful implementation project! The team just returned back from the Vista Alegre Phase 2 project. Check out our previous posts to see photos from the process!

We are now raising funds for our next water system, which will likely be a Phase 2 project in the community of Amazonas, where we recently completed a successful system. If you or your company could make a donation to help us with this project, it would be greatly appreciated by our team and the people of the Amazonas village. Our volunteers will complete the engineering work, but we still need funds for the system materials and other project expenses. A donation link is below.

Both personal and corporate donations are very welcome. We are now in the process of updating our flyers, Web Home Page, Facebook, YouTube and our other web sites to publicly acknowledge the recent generous donations made by our corporate sponsors.

Our team thanks you for your support! As always, please feel free to reach out to us directly with any questions or comments via the page or [email protected]

https://support.ewb-usa.org/give/83741/ #!/donation/checkout

Warm Regards,

Dennis Johnston
Fundraising, EWB-SCP

11/23/2024

We did it! The water system for the Peruvian Village of Vista Alegre is completed and working! Things went pretty fast at the beginning of the project and then was bogged down by quite a few different plumbing problems, but we got them all solved. There have been some rains and the village now has clean water in the tanks for drinking.

A big thank you to our entire Engineers Without Borders team both here in Peru (David, Malia, Callie & Chuck) and the rest of the team back home in Sonoma County! And a huge thank you to all of our sponsors who made this water system possible for the village. Thank you! 

11/23/2024

11/23/2024

A small tribute to a few of the amazing people from the Amazon Promise NGO who supported our efforts building a drinking water system for the village of Vista Alegre in Peru: Our jungle guide and construction expert Jose Valles, our cook Nancy, and our boat captain Cesar, and our Dr. Alex. We couldn’t be doing this project without them! 

11/18/2024

Some heavy Amazon rains here in Peru last evening and this morning. That makes us very happy because we know that the water systems we built for nearby villages can take in and store more drinking water which they need very much right now. Before this storm there was a drought here.

We made great progress on the water system for Vista Alegre today! We did have to battle with many issues getting the plumbing parts to fit together. Frequently lots of scraping with a knife and sanding was required in order to get the parts to fit together properly.However even in spite of that we think we are close to being done, just a few last details to finish up tomorrow, and then we will turn the keys for the drinking water systemover to the villagers.They have been one of the hardest working villages we’ve ever worked with.

A few pictures from today are attached.


11/17/2024

A long day today working at the Vista Alegre village in the Amazon region of Peru. On the drinking water system we are building we were starting the plumbing and was hoping that might go fast. However many of the plumbing parts that were bought for us down here apparently don’t fit together. I don’t remember this happening like this on previous projects. Some of them appear to be from different manufacturers and aren’t exactly the same sizes inside the fittings. So many won’t fit onto the pipes. We are having to hand sand the inside surfaces of many of the parts by hand to make them work, and that’s taking a really long time to do. But that’s just how things are here in the jungle environment, and we are still making progress. We also put up fenceposts and the first flush posts. A little bit frustrating day, but still a productive and good one.

A picture of the water system and it’s current state is attached