Roughly 40 Rotary Club of Stratford volunteers gathered at the Jantzi Water Technologies warehouse Saturday morning to pre-fabricate and box 504 Aquabox water-filtration kits, which will be delivered to people living in disaster zones around the world.
In less than two hours Saturday morning, volunteers with the Rotary Club of Stratford worked to ensure that more than 500 families living in disaster zones around the world will have clean drinking water for as long as a year.
Roughly 40 Rotary volunteers gathered at the Jutzi Water Technologies warehouse in Stratford Saturday to pre-fabricate and box 504 Aquaboxes — the two-bucket, cost-effective, water-filtration system that can help survivors of natural and other disasters maintain access to clean drinking water as they recover.
“The contaminated water goes into the top (bucket) and it filters through into the bottom, and that is expected to provide potable water for one year for a family of four,” said Walt Bathe, chairman of the Rotary Club of Stratford’s Aquabox project , as volunteers worked around him, drilling holes in buckets, preparing filters and packaging the Aquabox pieces, along with a small assortment of personal-hygiene products like toothpaste and toothbrushes.
Since 2006, the Rotary Club of Stratford has prepared more than 12,000 water-filtration kits during these twice yearly assembly events, which Bathe said equates to roughly 62 million liters of clean drinking water. Once the kits are ready, they are stored until they are needed and delivered straight to disaster zones by disaster-relief organizations like GlobalMedic, which stepped in to help the Rotary Club distribute the water-filtration kits about six or seven years ago.
Laura Garrioch, an emergency programs officer with GlobalMedic who was on hand in Stratford Saturday to help organize the local Rotary Club’s Aquabox-kit assembly line, said the Rotarians purchase the buckets, filters and other materials needed for the kits, they assemble them in Stratford , and then GlobalMedic delivers them by truck to their warehouse in Toronto where they are kept until they can be delivered to countries hit by disasters.
“We make sure we get them into the hands of vulnerable community members who need access to clean drinking water, access to personal hygiene items,” she said. ” … Our rapid response teams will go into these countries to deliver them or ship them to our partners in those countries. … It means a lot to the people who receive them. They’re always very grateful because they don’t have access to clean drinking water and their families are at risk, their children are at risk of getting sick, and they don’t have access to health care like we do. So if they get sick, it’s a really big deal.”
The Aquabox systems use silver-impregnated, ceramic cartridges capable of filtering 15 liters of polluted water in each fill, trapping virtually all of the harmful bacteria and protozoan cysts that can be found in contaminated water and cause water-borne diseases like cholera and typhoid.
The Aquaboxes are made from locally sourced components and because they’re assembled by volunteers in Stratford, there are no administration costs. According to Bathe, there are just a handful of other Rotary clubs and other groups around the world that prepare and package low-cost water-filtration kits similar to the Aquaboxes.
For more information and to donate to the Rotary Club of Stratford’s Aquabox project, visit rotarystratford.com/SitePage/aquabox.
