Local Charity Seeks Help To Bring  Safe Water To Earthquake Victims

The World Help Foundation (WHF) of Newtown is collecting donations to help send water purification equipment to the victims of the earthquake in Iran.

World Help has already pledged to provide one of its disaster relief units comprised of three pieces of filtration equipment and a pump to Iran on an AmeriCares relief flight. AmeriCares, based in New Canaan, is shipping medicine, medical supplies, blankets, and other trauma-related materials for survivors of last Friday’s devastating earthquake in Bam, 630 miles southeast of Tehran.

Charles P. Samson, WHF chief operating officer, said the disaster relief unit will supply potable water for 300 to 500 people.

“We have 20 of these in stock and an inventory that enables us to assemble up to 400 of them,” Mr Samson said. “It depends on what kind of funding we can find. They have a value of $2,500 per unit. We have to purchase additional pumps and hardware.”

World Help is a public 501(c)(3) charity whose mission is to save lives by providing safe water to hospitals, clinics, schools, and villages in underdeveloped countries and disaster sites worldwide. World Help was founded in 1994 by Harvey Sellner, a retired aeronautical engineer who lives in Newtown, and has frequently operated in conjunction with Newtown Rotary Club members on projects around the world.

World Help designed a water purification system using ultraviolet light, which makes it possible to take existing water from contaminated sources and purify it. Sometimes water is piped from streams or wells to locations such as disaster sites where no running water is available.

For years the units have been assembled by volunteers, many of them local Rotary Club members, in an empty manufacturing plant on South Main Street. 

World Help joined forces with AmeriCares to help victims of the earthquake and mudslides in El Salvador in 2001 and in the February 2000 Venezuelan mudslide disaster that took the lives of well over 30,000 men, women, and children. The organization has installed water purification systems in Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico, Armenia, Somalia, and Ghana.

It is feared that the death toll from last week’s 6.6 earthquake in Iran could reach 40,000 out of a population of 80,000 in and around the quake’s epicenter. Nearly 75 percent of the ancient city of Bam has been reduced to rubble.

Anyone who would like to help can call Mr Samson at the World Help foundation at 270-7853 or out of the area at 800-814-2500. Contributions also may be sent to World Help Foundation, 255 South Main Street, PO Box 500, Newtown, CT 06776. The organization has a website at www.worldhelpfound.org.