Couple Makes Clean Water for the World

Polluted, bacteria-ridden water threatens the safety of many around the world. In fact, a a child dies every 15 seconds from a waterborne illness. But a homemade, suitcase-sized water purifier is changing the lives of people in impoverished countries.

Retiree husband-and-wife team Jerry and Judy Bohl have been building the 35-pound purification units -- which range in price from $750 for an electric unit to $1,500 for a solar-powered one -- in their Michigan garage and sending them to countries around the world since 2002. The Bohls’ Clean Water for the World nonprofit organization currently has 59 units in use in countries including Nicaragua, Kenya and Haiti.

Seed of an Idea

The Bohls originally were inspired by a 1995 church trip to El Salvador, where they were exposed firsthand to the dangers of contaminated water in the capital city San Salvador. “It’s hard to fathom that a city with a population of 1 million doesn’t have clean water,” said Jerry Bohl. “The city of San Salvador supplies water to its residents, and it’s all dirty, full of bacteria and viruses. It’s water they get sick with regularly, water we would get deathly sick on immediately. This isn’t right. The poor people don’t have clean water.”

After returning from Central America, the Bohls were determined to find a way to make an impact on El Salvador and other countries struggling to have clean water. “Helping others is something our religion stresses, but it’s also hard to go back to a comfortable life knowing this kind of stuff is happening when we can do something about it,” Jerry explains.

Jerry Bohl, whose background lies in tool and die making, solicited various companies to help build some sort of water purifier to fix this situation, but was told what he wanted would cost roughly $20,000 and require a special airplane to transport.

“I’m saying this isn’t what we want, man,” he explained. “We want something inexpensive, portable and adaptable.”

Bohl instead happened upon a college magazine article profiling a Rochester Institute of Technology professor who had created a water purifier that had been installed in Haiti and Cambodia. The Bohls took a trip to Rochester, NY, in 2002 to view the unit, and they returned with a basic blueprint for their new creation, which bore a cost of about $750.

Making Reality Happen in a Garage

Inspired by the professor’s unit, Bohl immediately got to work building an adaptation of the purifier in the couple’s two-and-a-half-car garage and says there wasn’t much trial-and-error involved because his units run almost solely on existing patented technology. It’s all a matter of making the pieces fit together. “I’m retired, and I have this whole garage filled with parts and tools,” he says. “I can spend all day out there working away on building this stuff. I love it.”

The Bohls’ purifier in some ways works like a normal commercial household unit, but with one very important difference: ultraviolet light.

Water that enters the device first passes through a cotton filter to remove any larger particles (5 microns to 5/1000th of a millimeter, or larger) that might be present. From there, the water heads to an ultraviolet light chamber encased in a protective metal cylinder, where a UV bulb (like the kind that makes posters glow in the dark) destroys nasty organisms and bacteria. Because UV light travels at such high frequencies, it’s able to break through the cell walls of these organisms and disrupt genetic makeup, rendering the bacteria impossible to reproduce. The newly cleaned water then flows through the bottom faucet, where it’s ready for drinking. The system is able to filter up to five gallons of water per minute.

After building an initial model, the Bohls eventually partnered with Western Michigan art professor Paul Flickinger, who at the time was teaching their son, Jeff. Flickinger had been on a similar trip and seen the same issues there. “I had been in Ethiopia, where I became very aware of the water problem there,” Flickinger says. “But I had no clue how to tackle such a problem. Their solution that was simple, portable and not overly expensive to build.”

Flickinger added his tweaks to the system, including a way to prevent untreated water from flowing out. “I’ve been an artist all my life, and the idea of this simplicity attracted me very much,” he says. “I sort of redesigned the unit so it would fit inside a box. I added a solenoid as a safety device so no water that was untreated could get through the system. I took it to Jerry and he liked it. It’s got the same components, just a different configuration.”

A Group Effort

Flickinger is now the executive director of Clean Water for the World and says the program relies heavily on volunteer efforts. “We’ll get a group of volunteers together, typically six or seven people,” he says. “We build them in an assembly line approach. We can build about five per day.”

Jerry Bohl stresses his units aren’t forced on the groups that receive them but are instead offered along with an explanation of the benefits they have to a community. “America has this reputation of forcing themselves into other people’s affairs,” he says. “That’s not what we’re about at all.”

Instead, the units come free of charge with a two-year supply of filters and light bulbs and an explicit stipulation that the units must be used for community good. In other words, the clean water cannot be sold or bartered. Clean Water for the World includes instructions in English, French and Spanish, and Bohl says he is able to help troubleshoot any issues that might arise.

“We had one in Guatemala where they hooked it up and it wasn’t working right. The unit was in the community center, and the guy who was taking care of it was a peasant up in the mountains. He was 2 hours from the unit and another hour away from a telephone. It took about a week to resolve that, and they put their light in backwards, even though there’s a picture on the instructions," he said with a laugh.

Still, the Bohls see their creation and effort as just part of a day’s work, and they hope the hard work will inspire others to pay generosity and good will forward.

“There are things we can do as human beings in our society that will pass on a good feeling day-to-do,” Bohl says. “It’s not that hard. You can take it one step further and get involved with your community or you can take a step beyond that and go for something worldwide. That’s where we’re at. We as human beings need to expand our area of involvement, whether it’s a smile or an effort as big as cleaning water.”