In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, my friend Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy doctor and co-founder of humanitarian tech consultancy IHS, traveled to Puerto Rico with his colleague Alex Hatoum. There the IHS team met up with a team from MIT's Lincoln Labs to install a cutting edge no-moving-parts water purification system. With funding from the Roddenberry Foundation, the system will be supported for a year after which it will be converted into a locally-owned social enterprise. The project is a small drop in an enormous bucket of need, but the technology can scale. It is much, much cheaper to filter and store water on site than to bring in pallets of bottled water by cargo plane, ship and truck. The environmental footprint is also considerably lighter.
A few years ago I helped Eric put together a deployment guidebook. These missions, which take place in the aftermath of major infrastructure-shredding disasters, are not for the faint of heart. At the time, no one imagined that there would ever be a domestic deployment. Yet six months on and much of Puerto Rico is still without power and access to clean water.
A few years ago I helped Eric put together a deployment guidebook. These missions, which take place in the aftermath of major infrastructure-shredding disasters, are not for the faint of heart. At the time, no one imagined that there would ever be a domestic deployment. Yet six months on and much of Puerto Rico is still without power and access to clean water.
