Braddock man's water filter project could help Haiti

Feb 8, 2010 — The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Chris Ramirez

Feb. 8, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Braddock has struggled mightily since the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s and lost its biggest employer when UPMC closed its hospital there just a week ago.

Still, Richard "Dick" Wukich said his hometown is uniquely equipped to help the neediest country in the Western Hemisphere during its latest crisis.

He wants to train people in Braddock to make inexpensive, portable, ceramic water filters that he has taken in the past decade to Africa, the Middle East and Central America. Now, he wants to take them to Haiti.

"Braddock is one of the poorest communities in the county, but it's in a position to help one of the poorest nations in the world," said Wukich, 66. "That's a powerful statement."

Wukich, a father of three who has taught at Slippery Rock University in Butler County since 1968, went to the Dominican Republic after the Jan. 12 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people in Haiti. He met with Lisa Ballantine, who runs FilterPure Inc., a nonprofit, ceramic filter-production plant outside the Dominican town of Santiago de los Caballeros.

He had worked with FilterPure Inc. before. Started in 2006, FilterPure had picked a site in Port-au-Prince for a filtration plant in Haiti, but it was damaged in the quake, Ballantine said. About 400 filters were made during Wukich's 10-day visit to the island and transported to Port-au-Prince and Jacmel, south of the Haitian capital.

The Dominican Republic facility is building and shipping filters into Haiti as fast as they are produced.

"There's so much demand," Wukich said. "They're (donors) shipping cases of water bottles to Haiti all the time. But you drink it and throw the bottle in the ditch.

"With these filters, you've got something that's reusable."

Wukich and Jeff Schwarz, an adjunct professor at the Community College of Allegheny College, teach a small group of teens and volunteers to mold filters in the converted basement of the Braddock Carnegie Library. They hope word about the filters will spread.

The next step would be to increase the volunteer effort into a filter production center that could create jobs in Braddock, where two in three residents are black and 34 percent of families live below the poverty line, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

"Not only does this potentially give people skills for the job market, ... they're literally saving someone's life," said Schwarz, also the studio coordinator at the library.

A single filter can clean 2 1/2 liters of water in an hour and costs about $20. Most filters last about a year, but Schwarz and Wukich said they are working to extend their usability.

Ideally, the training center in Braddock would prepare technicians not only to make filters but also to train others in the job, Wukich said.

"Six thousand children die (worldwide) each day because they don't have access to clean water, and they don't have to," he said.

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