Sitting off the coast of Haiti, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson can make some 400,000 gallons of its own fresh water every day, and much of it will soon be going ashore. The nuclear-powered vessel, which had been heading to its new home port in San Diego when it was diverted to Haiti hours after the quake, has massive desalination capacity purifying the same ocean saltwater it traverses and the Vinson has a daily excess of 200,000 gallons "that we can give away," says Cmdr. William McKinley, who oversees the desalination process.
Aircraft carriers have been desalinating ocean water since World War II, and in recent decades they've been giving their excess H2O away more frequently during humanitarian emergencies. But the 2004 Indonesian tsunami disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people and left much of the Indian Ocean coast a wasteland, tested desalinated water donation capabilities like never before.
One of the lessons aircraft carriers learned then, and during the Hurricane Katrina calamity a year later, was that they needed a better delivery medium if they wanted to make a difference during catastrophes of that magnitude.
As a result, early this week the Vinson will receive up to 100,000 special 2- and 5-gallon water "bladders," collapsible containers that will make transporting such enormous volumes of liquid more efficient. If the Vinson could actually move all 200,000 of its excess gallons to Haitian distribution points each day, it could as much as double the amount of water aid, which relief agencies and military helicopter pilots alike say is being used up faster than they can deliver it.
That in turn would allow donor governments and organizations to turn more of their efforts toward augmenting other critical necessities like food, medical supplies and, later on, more long-term help like building materials.
Desalination is essential for nuclear-powered vessels like the Vinson. Nuclear reactors heat the water that makes the steam that powers the ship but that water has to be pure. Some ships use reverse osmosis technology, which pumps the saltwater under extremely high pressure through cleansing membranes. The Vinson employs a process that can boil the ocean water at lower temperatures and separate the brine.
The carrier has four such water distilleries that can each produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day for both steam power and the crew's daily needs. In recent years, water-scarce cities near seacoasts worldwide have begun duplicating the method as well.
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