As an incident commander, you are responsible for ensuring the safety of your crews in an extremely challenging work environment. By the time most emergency personnel stop to drink water, they are already at a dangerous point of dehydration. This is compounded by the challenges of providing easily accessible water to your crews. While water is available on the apparatus, it is not clean to drink or easy to distribute. Bottled water is an equally challenging alternative as it requires logistics, available personnel and transportation.
Top 5 considerations for water purification:
- Your water purification system should utilize advanced technology that not only cleans and filters but also disinfects.
- The best water filtration systems are lightweight, portable and solar powered. This allows maximum flexibility in deployment.
- A water treatment system that produces 60 gallons per hour can sustain most any size through an an emergency.
- Water filtration units should be able to operate with zero recovery time to ensure continuous firefighter rehab.
- Water purification units that are truck mounted provide immediate access to potable water.
Reasons bolted water does not work:
- It is expensive.
- It requires manpower and vehicles to obtain, distribute and dispose of.
- It produces unnecessary waste.
- It can not replenish.
- It is hard to transport to remote deployments or to disaster zones.
A water purification system should contain advanced technology to ensure your crews are drinking safe water. Mechanical filtration eliminates debris and micro-organisms by filtering water through tiny pores. The smallest filter in your system should be no more than.5 microns. Ultraviolet light provides disinfecting by killing organisms it is exposed to. For maximum exposure, your filtration system should expose water to UV light through a double pass system. Lastly, a carbon block filter will remove taste and odor from the water.
Getting your crews to drink often will prevent accidents and provide more up time. This is accomplished by providing easy access to clean, safe, good tasting water. For more information visit http://firstwaterinc.com .