Clean water, a lot more challenging that it appears!
Sipping on sun-water at SOS Children’s Village in Haiti
As we recently reported, 10 of GE’s solar-powered water purification units were shipped to earthquake-stricken Haiti to help with the country’s desperate needs for clean water. Now, seven of the Sunspring units are up and running — with each able to provide safe water for up to 10,000 people per day. Our Sunspring partner, Innovative Water Technologies, was hard at work this week completing installations that bring the total of availableclean water in the Port au Prince area to over 40,000 gallons per day.
The video below was created and produced by Mark Tchelistcheff of openfilms.netand documents the installation at the SOS Children’s Village orphanage in Santo, Haiti.
In addition to the work at SOS, Innovative Water Technologies installed one of the units at STEP, which stands for Seminaire Theologique de l’Eglise de Dieu en Haiti. The photo below, taken from a cell phone, shows the line-up for water just minutes after the installation was completed. The Sunspring unit is operating on the other side of the wall.
The STEP Clinic in Croix des Bouquets serves the needs of a surrounding community of approximately 25,000 people and provided critical medical care to the community after the earthquake.
The team on the ground in Haiti says that so far, all of the untreated water samples they have tested have shown unsafe microbiological contamination — which means the necklace of SunSpring systems being installed can make a critical difference.
The unit at the SOS Children’s home is seen just after installation was completed.
As the team writes on their Haiti update blog: “IWT installed the first Sunspring water filtration system in Haiti in February of 2009. Little did they know they would be back a year later to facilitate the installation of more systems in and around Port au Prince. Hospitals and clinics, orphanages, central city areas, and youth sports centers are just a few of the organizations benefitting.”
The ecomagination technology effectively treats groundwater, surface-water, and recycled rainwater or cistern water. They are solar-powered, portable, and able to produce clean drinking water using the same membrane treatment technology used by large scale treatment plants.
With much of Haiti’s water supply contaminated following the quake, the need for filtration equipment to prevent dysentary and other diseases is extremely high.
As CBS news noted in its story about the Haiti shipments: “The units are quick to deploy and can be operational three hours after arrival. That means they can have an immediate impact — but they can also be of critical use long-term, as they operate for years.”
Of the $2.5 million that GE has targeted for earthquake relief in Haiti, $1 million will be used to aid in long-term recovery. In addition to the water units, GE sent critically needed medical technologies, such as ultrasound, anesthesia and x-ray, and mobile video units to help search and rescue teams.
* See the status of installations via Google Maps and Google Earth View
* Read updates on the IWT “Haiti Today” blog
* See more photos of IWT’s work in Haiti on their Picasa albums
* Read “Solar-powered water purification units ship to Haiti” on GE Reports
* See a CBS news video about the Sunspring units heading to Haiti
* Learn more about our partner, Innovative Water Technologies
* Learn more about the GE Foundation
