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Water on Wheels (WOW) Mobile Emergency Water Treatment System Cart
Citation:
Goodrich, J. Water on Wheels (WOW) Mobile Emergency Water Treatment System Cart. U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC, EPA/600/S-20/110, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Following a natural disaster, communities need access to clean water not only for drinking but also for cooking, cleaning, and medical care. If the drinking water distribution system is contaminated, water treatment will be needed. Similarly, mitigation and recovery following a man-made incident, or an accident could require water treatment. Not all the water being treated needs to be drinking water quality. In some longer-term recovery efforts, contaminated stormwater or wash water from building decontamination activities only need to be treated to levels safe for disposal to the wastewater treatment plants or back to the environment. Rather than a treatment system, bottled water is typically the First Responders' choice when responding to an incident. However, long-term dependence on bottled water creates a large solid waste disposal problem and, often time, large vehicles transporting bottled water are unable to get to affected locations because of road debris and damage. In large or extended recoveries, bottled water use for bathing, sanitation, and other non-potable purposes is impractical. Mobile treatment of the highly contaminated water can significantly reduce the volume of water to be transported and reduce the liability and cost of transporting and disposing of a hazardous waste. First Respondents and community leaders can be quickly trained to operate the mobile emergency water treatment system cart.
Description:
Most emergency water treatment systems are large and expensive tractor-trailer mounted systems. They can be complicated to operate and maintain (high pressures and concentrated wastes) given their reliance on reverse osmosis water treatment technology. An emergency water treatment system could be designed and built so the sequence of treatments can be configured on-site to treat a broad spectrum of contaminants without using unnecessary and costly unit processes, and without producing large amounts of contaminated waste. The broad spectrum of potential contaminants includes chemical, biological and radionuclide contaminants. Based on these considerations, through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), a mobile emergency water system was designed, developed, and challenged in the field at full-scale. The mobile system consists of multiple filtration and disinfection treatment processes, multiple power sources, weighing less than 500 pounds and capable of being transported in the back of a pick-up truck while producing up to 10 GPM. Prototype systems were challenged at EPA's Test & Evaluation Facility, Water Security Test Bed, and deployed in Puerto Rico in response to Hurricane Maria.