We talk with George Greene, President of Water Mission, about the Bahamas. Water mission is unique in the world of NGOs with a powerful story. They are a nonprofit Christian engineering organization that designs, builds, and implements safe water solutions.
Hurricane Dorian hit this area of The Bahamas with 185 miles per hour sustained winds, gusts up to 220 miles per hour, 20-foot storm surge, and then also on top of that, 30 inches of rain.
George Greene, President of Water Mission
Water Mission is on the ground providing emergency safe water solutions to communities that were devastated by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. In the midst of this heartbreaking tragedy, we not only hear about the unique and costly challenges of providing clean, safe water to these communities, but how volunteers, engineers, and corporate partners are working to make a difference.
Learn more about Water Mission Here.
Transcript
George Greene:
Hurricane Dorian hit this area of The Bahamas with 185 mile per hour sustained winds, gusts up to 220 miles per hour, 20-foot storm surge, and then also on top of that 30 inches of rain.
Robert Osborne:
Welcome to The Outfall and thanks for joining us today. Seriously, thank you. I think we’ve got a really good show for you today. I’m Robert and today Amy, David, and I focus on The Bahamas. We talked with George Greene, president of Water Mission. Water Mission’s a unique in the world of NGOs with a powerful story. They are a nonprofit Christian engineering organization that designs, builds and implement safe water solutions. So right now, Water Mission is on the ground providing emergency safe water solutions to communities that were devastated by Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas. In the midst of this heartbreaking tragedy, we not only hear about the unique and costly challenges of providing clean, safe water to these communities, but how volunteers, engineers, and corporate partners are working to make a difference.
George Greene:
Thank you for having me on the show and the opportunity to talk a little bit about who we are, as we think about being prepared and what’s necessary to be able to do the kinds of things we do. As far as The Bahamas goes, it’s a unique situation and at Water Mission, we respond to disasters. We’ve responded to every major disaster over the last 19 years. This area of The Bahamas is a little bit unique in terms of needs because it’s surrounded by the ocean. Most of the places that we go, we have the ability to treat freshwater, whereas in this case, basically, seawater is the only option. Treating seawater is actually the most difficult of any kind of contaminated water to treat.
David Ladner:
This is David. I knew about your standard, your conventional treatment trained type processes, but how long have you had the seawater reverse osmosis capability?
George Greene:
So that’s a great question. We have used reverse osmosis in the past and we’ve done it for a number of years. However, when you look at the energy cost and the maintenance associated with using reverse osmosis, it’s prohibitive, especially if you have alternative options. While we have experienced with RO and we had some equipment that was in stock, and the ability to send, it’s not something that we typically use. This disaster was a real challenge for us in terms of just mobilizing equipment and getting it on-site. The other thing too is in this area of The Bahamas, prior to the storm, the primary way that people were getting water in this area is actually not through reverse osmosis. The primary way that people have been getting water in this area, The Bahamas, for the last couple hundred years is actually through rainwater collection.
George Greene:
As a quick recap, Hurricane Dorian hit this area of The Bahamas with 185 mile per hour sustained winds, gusts up to 220 miles per hour, 20-foot storm surge, and then also on top of that, 30 inches of rain. If you think about the homes in these areas, basically rainwater collection, you’ve got to have a place to put the waters. Most homes would have a tank that they referred to as a cistern and their gutters would be hooked up to this tank, so when it rains, the water would just flow into these tanks.
George Greene:
The problem you have is when you have a 20-foot storm surge, a lot of these tanks that had freshwater in them were contaminated with saltwater. And then the other thing that you start to think about is coming out of this big storm is the 185 mile per hour winds and just the total devastation, there are a lot of destroyed roofs. And so the ability to continue to collect rainwater after this storm has to do a lot with the ability to get roofs back in place and gutters in place. And so when we talk about reverse osmosis, that really is kind of the only guaranteed way that we can go in and make sure that there’s access to safe water. In the aftermath of a disaster, the number one need is access to safe water. So you really need to make sure that that’s in place and done as quickly as possible.
George Greene:
The Water Mission is unique. We are a charity, but we have been very intentional over the years to approach things from a very focused technical perspective. And so with that in mind, that’s kind of one of the key differentiators for who we are. I think we have maybe 14 licensed professional engineers on staff here in Charleston. Globally, we have engineers throughout the 10 countries outside of the United States that we have on staff as well. There’s also been a tremendous opportunity to partner with corporations that make equipment that would be necessary to be able to respond. And so we’ve been extremely fortunate that over the last, I’d say, probably 15, 16 years, we’ve been able to get in place some really strong relationships with corporations that we refer to today as our strategic partners. One of those is a company called Parker Hannifin, and one of their divisions or subsidiaries is a group called Racor Village Marine. They specialize in making reverse osmosis systems.
George Greene:
We have a number of other large corporations that make products or provide services that have also been incredibly valuable in this relief effort. The largest pump company in the world is a company called Grundfos. They’ve made a number of pumps available for us. FedEx is a corporate partner. They’ve essentially moved everything and anything you can possibly think of, from overnighting reverse osmosis systems from Racor Village Marine in California to Florida, where we’ve been able to stage it on into relief going directly into the islands. I say all that because, in order to be able to be effective in your response, you really need to kind of have that little network in place.
George Greene:
In the Bahamas, we now have, I don’t know, probably maybe close to 20 RO units that we’ve actually deployed. They range in size from a couple of hundred gallon per day type system, to a 30,000 gallon per day seawater grade, reverse osmosis system. These are being positioned all throughout the islands. They are continuing to roll out, even as we have this little interview here.
David Ladner:
How soon did y’all get some of the units down there?
George Greene:
The storms usually move pretty quickly. They’re in and out and Dorian just kind of stalled, and just sat there and it just hammered the islands for days. It finally did move on. It came up the coast and it shut everything down in Florida and South Carolina. We had mandatory coastal evacuations here in the Charleston area and we actually had to physically shut our office down, where people were evacuating. Major distractions in our ability to get in.
George Greene:
And so all of the aid organizations that typically respond to disasters, they knew there was going to be a need and immediately were starting to pre-position people in Nassau, to be able to start the flow of aid. So they were really have been kind of two significant relief movements to support aid into these areas of The Bahamas. There’s been the traditional kind of go through the government route, which is staged and going through NASA. And then there’s the grassroots effort that’s kind of been locals, maybe second homeowners or people that have done a lot of boating in that area that have just said, “I’m going and I’m going to help.” It’s been a really kind of inspiring and beautiful thing just to see the level of assistance that’s coming, at least from what I’ve seen. Because these people have just been nailed. And my understanding is this is the worst hurricane that’s ever hit The Bahamas.
Amy Anderson:
You mentioned how the Bahamians collect and store their water in cisterns. How does this situation compared to your response when you’re looking at a place where people get their drinking water from rivers or wells or other places? Because you do have all of this technical expertise, how do you tailor your responses?
George Greene:
In one extent, there’s no difference. We have water quality standards that we look to make sure are in place before water is distributed. And so with that, basically there’s just some standard testing that’s taking place. So, it’s really a matter of tailoring the treatment requirements. And now having said that, the types of systems that we’re sending in to places where we’re feeding freshwater, when you look at the power requirements and the footprints, compared to a reverse osmosis system that’s capable of seawater grade treatment, it’s really a night and day type thing. The energy requirements are exponentially greater to be able to make seawater into potable water.
George Greene:
From that perspective, the amounts of water we’re looking at are significantly smaller in what we’re providing. We’re looking at scaling that up over time, but we’re also… This area of The Bahamas, there is some infrastructure that’s there, and so outside of coming in with looking at reverse osmosis and providing basic drinking water needs, looking at helping with some of the rebuilding and getting roof systems back in place so rainwater collection can start again. There’s actually a municipal system that is in place in The Abacos and also in Freeport, where there is a freshwater kind of [inaudible 00:09:31] that is able to be tapped into on the main lens. And we’ve started to see distribution systems that have been put in place where they have maybe shallow wells on the mainland, that are maybe 20 feet deep and pulling water out and it’s basically just well water, and making that available to communities on the mainland. But also some of the islands have pipe water as well.
George Greene:
We’ve actually mobilized and connected with the group that’s responsible for that, the government group in The Bahamas is called the Bahamian Water and Sewerage Group. And we’ve already connected with them and we have work crews that are going out and looking at some of these pumping stations, as well as some of the sewer lift stations that they have in some of the larger communities. One of our other corporate partners is a Kohler Company and Kohler is the largest small engine manufacturing in the world and has a full range of generators. The ability to deploy generators, get those out and be able to turn pumps back on, that’s a fairly straightforward thing that can have a huge impact as well.
George Greene:
One other thing that’s been interesting, two years ago, Hurricane Maria came through. Pretty much all of our work is in developing countries. And the reason for that is that the infrastructure that’s in place in developed countries, it doesn’t necessitate the need for the services that we provide. And to clarify that, when we go into a disaster situation, the kinds of situations that we’re going into are where people’s alternative for drinking water is like drinking water out of a ditch or a mud puddle. And as you think about in the United States, following a major disaster, there’s never been a case where that’s been the situation, where US citizens have not had access to some kind of water. And typically, what we see is they just get overwhelmed with being able to sustain things on a temporary basis through bottled water. And they just have pallets of it that are delivered by groups like the National Guard or something like that.
George Greene:
In Puerto Rico, we saw that happening in rural communities where there wasn’t anything. It was getting kind of close and on the edge and that and we responded in a lot of these rural communities. What we found were similar to what we’re finding in The Bahamas, there are a bunch of wells with five horsepower pumps, that basically respond with getting generators in place and turning pumps back on.
George Greene:
One of the really neat things that happened with Puerto Rico was that with these rural applications, we saw that we could actually come back in and bring in solar-power to run their pumps because there were issues and concerns around grid reliability and sustainability. And we’ve been implementing solar-powered pumping solutions for decades now in refugee camps in Africa and communities that have no power whatsoever. And so taking some of the learning and experience that we’ve had from the community development work that we’d done in other countries and developing countries, and taking that back now and initially in helping in Puerto Rico, and now we’re actually seeing a similar type application where we probably longterm, do some similar type stuff like that in The Bahamas.
George Greene:
Solar is going to be a good thing to look at. At the same time, where we are in The Bahamas, I tell you, the sun and the salt and what that does in terms of maintenance requirements and just trying to keep things running, these are really challenging places to try and put things and sustain things just from the sun and the salt type wear and tear, corrosion and ultraviolet light degradation.
Robert Osborne:
With these reverse osmosis units, is this something that volunteers put together there in Charleston or assemble parts of that, and then you ship it down? How does that work?
George Greene:
What you worked on in Charleston was a standard water treatment system that we stock and we keep on hand to be able to air freight into disasters. That system that you referred to is called the Living Water Treatment System. That one is capable of treating fresh water. We actually do not stock reverse osmosis systems. Everything that we’ve been doing with deploying reverse osmosis systems has been working with our corporate partner to find the systems that they had either sitting on the shelf in their factory in Carson, California, which is LA, or finding systems that have been sitting on the shelves of some of their distributors that are located throughout the country, and then mobilizing them. And then we actually sent in some of our engineers to go and basically put these systems together. So I would say, this is a much more intense application and it’s kind of an out of the box application from what we normally do with some nonstandard equipment. Just because when you look at trying to think from a cost comparison standpoint.
George Greene:
Just to give you an idea, the Living Water Treatment System, I think we say the deployed cost for that equipment into a disaster. And this is a very kind of general estimate because if the disaster is in Mexico, or if the disaster is in Indonesia, the deployed costs change significantly, on how far away it is. Right? But if you were to look at the deployed cost of Living Water Treatment System, that system typically costs somewhere, I think, around $12,000. That includes a six-kilowatt diesel generator, and it can produce about 10,000 gallons of water per day.
George Greene:
We have 4,000 gallon per day reverse osmosis systems that we’re deploying into The Bahamas. And the RO unit alone has a $25,000 price tag, and that is at a significant discount to Water Mission, based on the relationship that we have. On top of that, that 4,000 gallon per day system requires a 20-kilowatt diesel generator to run it, whereas, our Living Water Treatment System is running off of a six-kilowatt generator. If you start to think about how different these things are, it requires three times the power and produces less than half the water and then you can look at the cost as well and just kind of see. So it’s a much more complicated situation than what we normally get in.
David Ladner:
Absolutely. And then I’m thinking about your engineers too. If they’re used to your standard systems and now they’re going in and working on these RO systems, has it been something that has been a learning curve for them, to get up to speed with how to run these things?
George Greene:
No. Well, maybe to a certain extent. But we know how RO works and we’re familiar with the equipment. And so more so, it’s a matter of when you’re trying to get into a disaster situation, you think about… When you go and try to do a project at your house, I don’t know how you guys are, but I’ll get into a project and when I’ve sat down thinking about it, I might end up taking three or four trips to Lowe’s because I didn’t think about all the parts that I needed upfront when I started the project. Well, you don’t have that luxury in a disaster situation. You got to be intentional about making sure everything that you need, that you’re taking it with you because you can’t necessarily go find a hardware store and find stuff. I think that’s more along the lines where there significant challenges for our staff. They know what they’re doing.
George Greene:
The issue for us though is a lot of times when we get in, we’re trying to set up equipment and then move on to the next installation. We’re actually, I think, about to put out a push for some volunteers to come in and help us because what we need is we need some people to come in. With some basic training, just about anybody can run one of these things, but we need to have the ability to hand it off and then move on to the next installation.
David Ladner:
As far as the training and just thinking about the personality operators, what is the time horizon that you’re thinking about? How long do you intend these units to continue operating? And who’s going to operate them longterm? What’s the plan there?
George Greene:
So it’s a great question. And the short answer is we don’t really know. We’re probably going to be working in The Bahamas for a year, maybe more. And as we start to think about how do we stabilize, one of the ways that we’ll look to stabilize things is going from things like fast run generators to continuous run generators. But that’s still not a great solution. Getting grid power back out to some of these locations, I mean, we might be talking years. What are we, three weeks into the relief effort at this point, maybe four weeks in? Plans are still kind of forming and what that’s going to look like. But what dictates our timelines is really whether there’s a need there or not, as well.
Amy Anderson:
In general, how long does a unit stay in a particular area? Do you come into the area and leave it as needed? Do you have a general timeline that you look at? Are some units still where you left them when you started?
George Greene:
So that’s a bit of a hard question to answer because every application is different. When we go into developing countries, some of these places where we’re working, they may not have had access to safe water before we came. And so our goal whenever we go in, if there’s a need, is to transition it into a longterm opportunity.
George Greene:
Now, in The Bahamas, if you were to kind of look at where we respond and compare them side by side, one of the ways to look at it would be the incidence of waterborne illness. And if you were to take The Bahamas and compare it to like a Honduras, or to a Uganda, or something like that, I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I would expect that The Bahamas are in a significantly better place because they had access to safe water to start with, that’s just been compromised as a result of a disaster. As opposed to a Uganda where you have a crisis where the water quality basically, it’s much worse than it was before. But what it was before is still something that wouldn’t be safe to drink. It really very significantly.
George Greene:
In The Bahamas, what we’re thinking about is there won’t be a need for our services on an island-wide type basis, from island to island on a longterm basis. But we are still thinking about some of these RO units that we’re sending down there, that we might transition them into a longterm resilience type system, where maybe what we do is we build out a location in some of the major hubs throughout the islands, where they would have an RO unit that is in place with a power system. So that next time a disaster hits, if there’s a need for it, they can crank it up. The minute you’ve exposed it to saltwater, there’s a life associated with how long it’s going to last. And there also, membranes are very expensive. And so there are a lot of complicated things that have to be thought through in terms of when you’re doing something like this, how effective is it really going to be when it’s all said and done.
David Ladner:
Someone listening to this podcast right now that wants to help, what’s one way that they can help you all?
George Greene:
We’re about to put out a request for volunteers. I don’t know if that’s going to be listed on our website. I think it’s going to be a broad push to anybody that’s on any of our email distribution lists. What we’re asking for though are for people that can deploy for three to four weeks. Obviously, not everybody can just drop everything they’re doing and go for a month. But as you look at kind of the ability to really plugin and to be able to be helpful, there is a time requirement. There’s a learning up curve when you get into a situation for, what does it take to actually get into a place and actually add value before you leave? And so that’s really kind of the focus from a volunteer perspective.
George Greene:
We are, of course, taking donations and if people want to financially contribute there’s options on our website to direct people on how they can do that too. We are a Christian ministry and we believe fully in the power of prayer. And that’s also something that people can do. And just as you look at the needs in The Bahamas especially, but there’s a lot of hurting in this world.
David Ladner:
I just wanted to say it’s amazing that you were able to get down there with such a technically challenging technology that you’re applying and you’re already there in the short weeks that we’re talking about. It’s pretty fascinating.
George Greene:
Well, we have a lot of Clemson engineers on staff that helped make it possible and Clemson engineers usually have to help the other engineers.
David Ladner:
I like it.
Amy Anderson:
This is Amy. Thanks for joining us this week on The Outfall. Make sure you subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify, so you never miss an episode. And while you’re at it, go ahead and leave us a rating on iTunes, or simply tell a friend about the show. Share the water love.
