How did a Florida hospital get emergency drinking water after Hurricane Milton?

When Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on Oct. 9, St. Petersburg’s water main lines were ruptured. Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, which has a large neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), was one of the affected hospitals in the area.

Fortunately, Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida had been thinking ahead and worked with Genesis Systems to put one of the company’s atmospheric water generation machines in a nearby storm shelter before Milton arrived. A loss of potable water would typically be cause to evacuate, but “it’s very hard to evacuate NICU babies. It’s very time consuming, very tricky, and it can be risky,” according to Weida. So on Oct. 10 after the storm had passed, Genesis’ WaterCube 1000 was brought to the hospital to act as a backup water supply.

According to David Stuckenberg, co-founder and chief operations officer at Genesis Systems, the WaterCube 1000 creates safe water by “form[ing] a handshake with the water in the air” using materials that absorb water like proprietary liquid and solid sorbents. These materials are then heated to extract the water. The machine can produce nearly 2,000 gallons of water in 24 hours.

The hospital didn’t end up needing to tap into the WaterCube after all, as the city sewer system was functional again with a boil advisory shortly after the machine arrived. However, the whole process was still a good exercise in demonstrating how these machines could be useful in a disaster scenario.