With 660 participants on Saturday, Sept. 21, the Beaufort Walk for Water, now in its third year, has made a name for itself on the community events calendars of Beaufort and Port Royal.

All proceeds from the event, estimated at $65,000 this year, will benefit Charleston-based Water Mission, a non-profit Christian engineering organization that builds safe water solutions in developing countries and disaster areas.

“We were blown away by this year's response by the community and our sponsors, as we ended up almost doubling the participants over last year,” said Robert Lasher, chair of the Beaufort Walk for Water committee. “I think people realize how incredibly important having clean safe water really is, and how Water Mission is doing this right. Knowing that participating in this walk can give one person access to safe water for life, it really hits home.”

People started arriving around 8 a.m. at Live Oaks Park in Port Royal. After the opening ceremonies finished at 9 a.m., participants picked up a bucket and began to walk a 3-mile route. The Port Royal Fire Department filled up the walkers' buckets at the Sands for the remainder of the walk to symbolize the walk that millions of women and children make every single day to collect unsafe water.

Kevin Herr, Director of Church Partnerships with Water Mission, demonstrated a typical water filtration system used to provide clean and safe water in the 55 countries Water Mission currently operates, and the importance of long-term investment into these communities.

“Water Mission was actually born out of disaster relief work after Hurricane Mitch in Honduras,” Her said. “Today, 21 years later, partially thanks to support from the regional walks such as Beaufort Walk for Water, we were able to mobilize quickly in the Bahamas to set up a solar-powered process using reverse osmosis to remove the saline from readily available ocean water in the Bahamas.”

For more information, follow @BeaufortWalkforWater on Facebook and Instagram, or call 843-769-7395. Donations can be made online at: events.watermissions.org/Beaufort19.