Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital was hit by Hurricane Milton earlier this week
Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Wire/Lay
A children’s hospital that lost access to water as a result of Hurricane Milton is now using a device that can harvest drinking water directly from the air, in a test of how such atmospheric water harvesting systems can be used in disaster response.
“When a hospital has water and electricity, you’re good,” he says David Stuckenberg At Genesis Systems, he designed the apparatus in the Florida company. The system uses absorbent materials called metal organic frameworks to concentrate moisture in the air pumped through the machine, then releases pure water when the material is heated to about 8°C.
Such atmospheric water harvesting systems have long attracted interest due to their ability to operate independently of other water infrastructures. A small but growing number have been installed and used to supply daily water to off-grid communities cities with poor water infrastructure or arid places where water supplies are unreliable, even for military operations. An Arizona-based company that makes solar-powered “hydropanels” has one, too it started selling its bottled water from the air.
Another way these flexible systems have been used is to respond to disasters that leave communities without reliable water supplies. As Hurricane Milton approached the west coast of Florida, Jason WeidaSecretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, saw an opportunity to try this.
With Hurricane Ian in 2022, Weida saw how water problems and power outages forced some hospitals to close for weeks, sometimes requiring evacuation days after the storm itself. He discovered Genesis Systems’ technology while on tour Damage from Hurricane Helenewhich took land on September 26. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be good for next year’s hurricane season?'” he says. “Little did I know that two weeks later we would be preparing for Hurricane Milton.”
Before reaching shore in Milton on October 9, the system was moved to the state’s disaster response scene. Shortly after the hurricane passed, a truck drove to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, where leaking water pipes disrupted the hospital’s water supply. Weida says that this particular hospital was a priority because of how difficult it would be to get the newborns out of the hospital’s large neonatal intensive care unit.
On October 10, workers connected the shipping container-sized system to a generator, which is currently producing 2,000 gallons of potable water while the hospital’s regular water supply is fully restored. Stuckenberg says the system can work anywhere the humidity is above 10 percent, though it becomes less efficient as the humidity drops. He estimates that the system installed in Florida’s humid air uses about 0.8 kilowatt hours of electricity per gallon of water, putting the cost of operating the system at between $10 and $20 per day.
There are other ways to ensure a water supply in an emergency, from trucking in buckets or bottles to using reverse osmosis systems. After the experience of Hurricane Ian, some hospitals they dug their own wells. But Weida says aerial harvesting is a very flexible and quick way to secure water supplies. “Redundancy is very important,” he says. “That provides another layer.”
Atmospheric water harvesting systems can be an “important tool” in disaster response when water supplies can be offline for long periods of time, he says Paul Westerhoff at Arizona State University, and are well suited for places with relatively high humidity such as Florida. However, he says, their dependence on electricity, often from a generator, has been a problem in past disasters.
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