Canadas DART starts providing drinking water in quake-struck Haiti: military

JACMEL, Haiti - It took long, hard days by a handful of military engineers but the Canadian Forces finally started producing much-needed drinking water Tuesday in earthquake-devastated Haiti.
The Disaster Assistance Response Team was forced to take salty water from the Caribbean Sea, and go through a long filtering process because rivers are so polluted.
Maj. Earl Maher, an engineer with DART in Jacmel, said Tuesday he was on the first Forces flight into Haiti, shortly after the quake.
Maher said he has been working 20-hour days with a half dozen staff to get the water purification system up and running and was so exhausted he wasn't sure how long he had been in the country.
But they finally produced 5,000 litres of fresh drinking water which was delivered by United Nations trucks to the people of Jacmel, a town about 30 kilometres southwest of the capital of Port-au-Prince.
The Haitians have some sources of water "but it's been tested and it is just not anywhere near a drinking standard," he told The Canadian Press in an interview.
So they were forced to take water from the Caribbean Sea and purify it instead, a process that takes twice as long.
Like so many problems in the devastated country, the problem now is not making the water but co-ordinating its' delivery.
"As long as we can get trucks to come in and take it and deliver it to people they will have fresh water to drink," said Maher.
DART also set up a water purification system in the city of Leogane which isn't running yet.
Much of Haiti's infrastructure was destroyed in the Jan. 12 quake and water supply became a critical problem for residents, many of whom were made homeless when buildings collapsed.