Hasta La Ideas

With additional editorial support from Nathan Jones, Keith Lampi, Gaylon White, Jos de Wit

Natural disasters can happen anywhere with little or no warning. When they do, they threaten community water sources and jeopardize public health by destroying vital pipelines or existing sanitation systems allowing the introduction of contaminants into the drinking water supply. One of the most immediate concerns post-disaster is providing a supply of clean, safe hydration to survivors to help prevent the occurrence and spread of waterborne diseases.

“Water is one of the first things that a victim of a natural disaster has to have to survive,” says Nathan Jones, vice president of government and institutional sales at HTI. “Many of the deaths that occur from natural disasters don’t happen because of the disaster itself, but what happens later—the waterborne disease that sweeps through the population.”

Every few years, villages in Mudimbia, Kenya are destroyed from floodwaters.

Humans can only live for a few days without hydration. In fact, waterborne illness can be the leading cause of death in the aftermath of a disaster. According to UNICEF, 1.5 million children die of waterborne illnesses every year. One in five children worldwide die from diarrhea—that’s more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. On any given day, over 50% of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from water borne disease.

Today, more than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water and the United Nations predicts that by 2025, 2/3 of the world’s population will face periodic and severe water shortage.

Starting in a Corvallis, Oregon, garage in 1987, Keith Lampi, now executive vice president and chief operating officer for Hydration Technology Innovations (HTI), Robert Salter and some college friends began focusing on how forward osmosis could be used in various humanitarian and industrial applications. In 1988, Lampi and Salter founded HTI in Albany, Oregon, with the purpose of utilizing their engineering and chemistry expertise to pioneer innovative membrane technology research using forward osmosis as a foundation.

When a fire destroyed HTI’s Albany facility in 2007, the disruption ironically allowed Lampi and his team a bit of space to work on some of the world’s wicked water problems. From those efforts, the HydroPack was born—an emergency hydration solution created specifically for use during the critical first days after a natural disaster.

Victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti received HydroPacks

“Our earliest forward osmosis pouch was a two-liter bag that we had developed for the military. But it required radio frequency welding and was fairly expensive to make,” says Dr. Jack Herron, director of product development at HTI. “Our desire was to create a relatively inexpensive pouch for disaster relief. The picture I had in mind was a 10-year-old child in a flood in India. What would he be attracted to and want to drink? What could he use properly without training? I knew from my days as a soccer dad that kids love juice pouches, so that was sort of the model. We also wanted to utilize a heat-seal process to keep the cost down. The HyrdroPack was the result.”

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