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Natural disasters often affect water infrastructure leading to contaminated drinking water and outbreaks of water born disease. As a part of their Siemens Caring Hands programme Siemens collaborated with SkyJuice Foundation to create SkyHydrant a portable water filtration unit.

This system has a working life of ten years and can be deployed for ongoing disaster risk reduction, and emergency solutions during times of disaster. It operates under as little as 300 mm of gravity head and without the need for an electrical power supply. Each filter produces up to 10,000 litres of safe pure drinking water per day depending on the source water. The robust filtration system can be easily transported, installed and maintained and can typically supply between 500 and 1,000 people.

The SkyJuice Foundation and Siemens have supplied more than 450 SkyHydrant potable water units worldwide. By deploying filter units in different countries, more than 22,000 people have benefited from the ongoing programme in the past few years. Over 200 SkyHydrants were deployed into the Indian Ocean tsunami-affected countries whilst further humanitarian installations have been commissioned in Sri Lanka, India, East Timor, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa, Fiji, Oman, Peru, Mexico and the Maldives.

Permanent installations of the system are anticipated throughout 2008 in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. In May 2008, 15 filter units were utilized in the earthquake-affected Sichuan Province in China. Siemens and SkyJuice Foundation have partnered with the Chinese Ministry of Construction to install the filters.

SkyHydrant has a large benefit-to-cost ratio: The complete operating system with accessories and test kits unit is nominally priced at 2,500 Euros. Allocating the costs, the system could be operated on a user-pays basis for less than 50 cents per person per year.

The vision of the project is to extend the programme for salt water and to start collaborative actions to remedy arsenic-affected waters for over 300 million people worldwide. Also the development of new project “delivery” models is planned, so that delivery is appropriate to on-site economic situations. An initiative to raise awareness of safe water hygiene education programmes will also be offered.