People require water to live, and they are used to turning on the faucet to get all they need. When safe water is no longer available, a potential disaster looms.
A community near Utopia, west of San Antonio, had a “complete water failure” this year, and “there were 1,100 homes that had no water for almost seven weeks,” said Mitch Chapman, director of Texans on Mission Water Impact.
It wasn’t an isolated situation. TXM responded to local water emergencies in Ennis, Bastrop, Quemado, Grand Prairie, Tyler and Dallas in 2024, as well as in a community in Arkansas. TXM also faces water challenges when responding with its regular relief teams after natural disasters.
“So the question would come, how do we help those people?” Chapman said during a Dec. 19 Zoom call to announce the launch of a more systematic response to emergency water needs, primarily in Texas.
More than 50 people participated in the call to “discuss some ways to be involved in a new launch for us and some water disaster relief.”
Chapman explained a multi-pronged effort to be prepared for helping people in water emergencies. And the varied efforts will require different types of volunteer involvement, he said, including involvement that works better for employed persons who are not available for long periods.
Multiple types of responses are needed because sometimes pressurized water is available but at other times is not.
Water Filtration
“The first part is water filtration support for our disaster relief arm,” Chapman said. “We began to notice that we're seeing more and more disasters” where boil orders are in effect. This means TXM volunteers are having restricted water access in these disasters, particularly involving its shower/laundry and feeding units.
“How do we handle it and put the least amount of strain on the kitchen staff and the shower and laundry teams as we possibly can?,” he asked. “We want them to be able to turn their faucets on and start cooking and not have to worry about any of that.”
TXM for years has been using water filters called 830AMs, Chapman said. “It's a filter cascade, and I won't go into a lot of detail there, but it's three small filters with some UV lighting.”
Chapman’s team has “revamped” the system with a “new design that's a little bit easier to function in the field, a little more easy to break down,” he said. Phil Ellery, of TXM Disaster Relief shower/laundry units, worked with Chapman to create a system “big enough to provide clean water for the shower and laundry unit.
“The number one thing that we're going to be doing is every time there's a (disaster relief) deployment, we’re going to be prepared to take these (filtration) units out and hook them up between their water source and the kitchen,” Chapman said.
It’s not just for use with normal disaster relief efforts. “What we want to do is anytime there's a boil notice, we would jump in there and hook these up,” and then stay to operate the equipment and train local volunteers in the system, he said.
Chapman said they use two types of filters. “There's a bucket filter that works great overseas, and there's a faucet filter that would work great here,” he said. The latter one can be “snapped onto their faucet, and then even if they're on a boil notice, they can just drink that water, cook with it, do everything they want to do with it.”
TXM Water Impact will be developing a process for distributing the faucet filters.
After a recent boil order in Hurst, TXM sent pallets of water and handed out filters. “What we want to learn to do is be more strategic in that, how we do that,” Chapman said. “We're looking to build teams that would be prepared in those situations to come and work alongside” local residents, possibly from a church.
In addition to providing the filters and teaching people proper usage, the Water Impact director said it’s important to slow down and pray with people.
Bulk Water Delivery
TXM now has a trailer that, when completed, will be able to deliver 6,000 gallons of water to a waterless community, Chapman said.
The trailer “comes out empty and gets set up on site, and we have contracts with different water organizations that would deliver 6,000 gallons of bulk water at a time into those tanks,” he said. “Then we set up a distribution hub that would allow people to bring their own containers” to be filled with up to 50 gallons.
This type of bulk water distribution could have been used in Utopia, Texas, where “1,100 homes had no water for almost seven weeks.”
The bulk water system will require about 18 volunteers “working around the clock to keep the bulk trailer full, set up an assembly line and let people come through and get 50 gallons of bulk water and two cases of water per day.
“And we would work again to set up at a local church, have them help us,” Chapman added. “But where our team comes into play is the support mechanism for that church, … because they're going to be more than willing to help, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to know what to do.
“And so our job … is that we learn all the ins and the outs of these systems” and then set them up in a community and instruct other volunteers, Chapman said.
Volunteer Opportunities
Water Impact disaster relief volunteers will need training regarding use of the filters, he said. “We would be able to do a lot of this training online in smaller settings. … But in-person training is also important because there's going to be times that we just need to put our hands on the equipment” and “walk you through it over and over and over again.
Chapman said the filters are “very easy to understand, but the big thing is becoming people who can train other people to use it.”
Water disasters usually require “very short-term deployments” of volunteers, he said. “So, if you're on this call and you're still working a job and you have things like that, these are deployments that can be very short-term.”
Such water needs often occur suddenly and require quick response. “So the ability to be able to deploy on a short-term basis for boil notices is a huge deal for us.”.
When supporting TXM Disaster Relief feeding units, the water team might deploy for a one or two-week stint, Chapman added.
“Typically now, if you deployed with a kitchen unit, you would deploy for two weeks at a time. I'm hoping and praying that we can find enough folks and can pull it off,” he said. “I would really like to deploy for one week at a time to open that opportunity up to people who may be busy, still working and have to use some time off to do that.
“Now, if it's a disaster or something that's local to our area or to where you live, then hopefully we could maybe even deploy a shorter term than that,” Chapman said. “Maybe you could do two or three days, and we could rotate that around.”
There also will be opportunities to volunteer at the TXM headquarters in Dallas, where the equipment is stored. The trailer that will haul the bulk water containers will need to be converted to a “support trailer for our new design” of filters.”
Volunteers will be needed to “come to the yard and to help pull that trailer in and pull everything out of it and start to reorganize it and help from the design phase to make sure that when we drag that out, that there's five assembled filters in there and enough parts to repair it 15 times,” Chapman said.
Also, filters return from deployment and have to be disassembled, dried, sterilized and then resealed into their container. That work requires volunteers at the Dallas headquarters.
Different responses in 2024 have shown that new TXM processes “worked really, really well,”, Chapman said. He saw the Zoom call as “throwing some ideas out there” for where the water disaster relief ministry is going. It was just the beginning.