Clean Water Access During Emergencies Webinar
About this Webinar
Originally presented on July 10, 2024
Following an emergency event, communities need access to clean water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, showering, laundry, and medical triage. EPA partnered with WaterStep to develop a modular, mobile water treatment system known as Water on Wheels - Emergency Mobile Water Treatment System (WOW Cart).
The WOW Cart has deployed in response to hurricanes, tornadoes, multi-county flooding, and decontamination of dam and levee pressure relief wells. Additionally, WOW Carts were sent to Ukraine, multiple state prisons to improve sustainability, ruggedized for military specifications including arctic conditions, and provide remote monitoring data transmission.
This webinar will present proposed capability expansion of WOW Cart to address the removal of heavy metals, brackish water, and pre-treat extremely poor raw water sources. It will discuss future deployments to integrate the WOW Cart into a packaged greywater reuse system and for use at fire fighting camps. Dave Carney, with Kentucky's Healthcare Coalitions, will discuss the integration of the WOW Cart into their Emergency Response Plan and the use of the 'Lily Pad Concept' to pre-deploy multiple WOW Carts across the state.
About the Presenter
Dr. James Goodrich is a Senior Science Advisor with EPA's Office of Research & Development located in Cincinnati, OH. He has a Ph.D. and B.S. from the University of Cincinnati and an M.S. from Florida State University. During his career, he has managed large multidisciplinary programs relative to water infrastructure protection, small community drinking water and wastewater needs, watershed protection and restoration, source water spill modeling, and international drinking water treatment technology demonstrations. He is currently responsible for full-scale evaluations of water infrastructure decontamination, innovative emergency water treatment technology, and emergency stormwater response mitigation tools.
Dave Carney, BS, MEP serves as a Readiness Response Coordinator for the Bluegrass Healthcare Coalition. His areas of responsibility include planning, providing technical assistance, training, response support and helping to ensure essential medical services are maintained with many different provider types associated within the regional healthcare sector. Dave leads the Bluegrass Healthcare Coalition which includes partnerships with hospitals, EMS, local health departments, emergency management and various healthcare services which cover 17 counties in Central Kentucky. His current response work requires either ESF-8 support in the State's Emergency Operations Center or providing asset and technical support in various areas of the Commonwealth where disasters have occurred.
Dave began his work in the Public Health field when he joined the Montgomery County Health Department as an IT manager in 2010. During the time spent at Montgomery County Health Department, he assumed the role as their Public Health Emergency Preparedness Planner. He worked closely with the county officials to establish and review plans that would mitigate the response to mass sheltering and other public health response events. Dave also took a lead role in furthering to develop the Health Department's Medical Reserve Corp, emergency operations planning and community wide Public Health response support.