THW helps earthquake victims with four mobile water treatment plants
25 February 2010 - Since the earthquake on Haiti, the German Federal Agency for Technical Disaster Relief (THW) has been in action on the badly damaged Caribbean island. With the help of four Berkefeld water treatment plants it has so far produced more than six million litres of drinking water for the sufferers of the natural disaster. The THW's agency's rapid reaction team for dealing with water supply abroad (SEEWA) at their two operational areas, Port-au-Prince and Léogâne, are relying on four highly mobile Type TWA 6 water treatment plants.
In the SEEWA camp in the capital, Port-au-Prince, the THW aid specialists are operating with local personnel two drinking water treatment plants. One month after they were started up, the two systems alone have so far treated about 4.5 million litres of water. Before distributing the water the THW experts test it for its purity in their mobile laboratory according to the prescribed World Heath Organisation (WHO) standards. In addition, for the last three weeks the THW operational team have been treating drinking water in two identical TWA 6 plants in the town of Léogâne, 30km west of Port-au-Prince, and distributing it to the people at seven issuing points.
The four Berkefeld treatment plants each produce about 6,000 to 8,000 litres of drinking water per hour and can supply a total of up to 120,000 people with clean water. The highly mobile and robust systems consist of a chemical disinfection as pre-treatment and a precoat filtration unit. The entire plant complex was designed and supplied in such a way that it complies with all international air cargo regulations and thus can be loaded in any commercial aircraft. The system, which is suitable for cleaning every heavily polluted surface water, has already successfully proven itself its in many disaster areas - including the region in South Asia hit by the tsunami in December 2004.
Apart from the TWA 6 plants deployed in Haiti, the THW has among other equipment two modular TWA 15 UF systems from Berkefeld. Depending on their configuration, these plant types clean five, 10 or 15 cubic metres of water per hour.The core component is a ceramic ultrafiltration, and among other things, the system also encompasses the process steps of coagulation and adsorption, pre-filtration with disc filters, UV light and depot chlorination. This plant complies with the demands of the German Drinking water standards KTW/DVGW W 270 and thus is also approved for potable water supply in Germany. Berkefeld, a subsidiary of Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, has supplied the THW for many decades with various systems for drinking water filtration, which are deployed successfully around the world as well as within Germany.
More at: www.berkefeld.de or www.thw.de
