Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital hit by Hurricane Milton earlier this week
Dirk Schade/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
A children’s hospital that lost its water supply after Hurricane Milton is now using a device that collects drinking water directly from the air to test how this atmospheric water-harvesting system can be used to respond to disasters.
“It will be great when hospitals have both water and electricity,” said David Stackenberg Genesis Systems is a Florida-based company that designed the device. 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 around 8°C.
Such atmospheric water harvesting systems have long attracted interest because of their ability to operate independently of other water infrastructure. A small but growing number have been installed to provide daily water to off-grid communities, and they have been used in cities with poor water infrastructure or in arid areas with unreliable water supplies, as well as in military operations. An Arizona company called Source makes solar “hydro panels” and has even begun selling canned air water.
Another way to use these flexible systems is in response to disasters that leave communities without a reliable supply of clean water. As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida’s west coast, Jason WadeThe secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration saw an opportunity to try this.
When Hurricane Ian struck in 2022, Veda found that water problems and power outages caused some hospitals to close for weeks, sometimes requiring evacuations days after the storm had passed. He learned about Genesis Systems’ technology while touring the damage caused by Hurricane Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be great for next year’s hurricane season?'” he said. “Little did I know that two weeks later we would be ready for Hurricane Milton.”
The system was brought to a staging area for the state’s disaster response before Milton made landfall on October 9. Shortly after the hurricane passed, a truck was taken to Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, where a leaking pipe cut off the hospital’s water supply. Veda said the hospital is a priority because evacuating newborns from the hospital’s large neonatal intensive care unit is very challenging.
On Oct. 10, workers connected the container-sized system to a generator, which now produces up to 2,000 gallons of drinking water per day, while the hospital’s regular water supply has been fully restored. Stuckenberg said the system can operate more or less anywhere with humidity above 10 percent, but its efficiency decreases as humidity drops. He estimated that a system installed in Florida’s humid air consumes about 0.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity per gallon of water, so the cost to run the system would be $10 to $20 per day.
There are other ways to ensure water supply in emergencies, such as trucking water into tanks or bottles, or using a reverse osmosis system. After Hurricane Ian, some hospitals Dig your own well. But Veda said harvesting water from the air is a very flexible and fast way to ensure a water supply. “Redundancy is very important,” he said. “This provides another layer.”
Atmospheric water harvesting systems can become a ‘vital tool’ in disaster response, when water supplies may be disrupted for long periods of time Paul Westhoff At ASU, perfect for locations with relatively high humidity, such as Florida. However, he said their reliance on electricity, often from generators, has been an issue in past disasters.
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