Local Rotarian’s Mission To A Stricken Venezuela

Brings Fresh Water And Hope

By Kaaren Valenta

Imagine driving from Newtown to New Haven and seeing nothing but devastation, entire communities leveled, buried up to 100 feet deep in cement-like mud.

That was the devastation Harvey Sellner saw in Venezuela last month when the Newtown Rotarian traveled through the LaGuaird area outside Caracas where more than 50,000 people died in catastrophic mudslides. Mr Sellner and Ken Erdman, an engineer who lives in Brookfield, spent a week working in the LaGuaird area to get safe drinking water to the survivors.

“Besides the damage to the buildings, the water treatment system had been reduced to practically zero,” Mr Sellner said. “The aqueducts which carried the water to the villages had been destroyed by the mudslides. It was a phenomenon of practically Biblical proportions. Venezuela needs so much help – people don’t know the magnitude of it.”

Mr Sellner is president of the World Help Through Technology (WHT) Foundation whose mission is to help the people of the world in disaster situations and to upgrade their quality of life. The WHT Foundation sponsors this effort with the cooperation of the Newtown Rotary Club and AmeriCares in New Canaan.

In an interview last week, Mr Sellner and fellow Rotarian Ed Osterman discussed the work done by the organizations to help the people involved in the disastzer in Venezuela.

“The aftermath of such a disaster is sometimes overlooked by the public and the news media,” Mr Osterman said. “Another disaster has taken its place in the news. But in this area of Venezuela, all of the infrastructure was destroyed and it is estimated that there are more than 100,000 people without homes or safe drinking water.”

In the village of Anare, the normal population of 1,500 had been swelled to 5,000 because of refugees. AmeriCares was providing tent housing but the population was threatened by diseases from the lack of potable drinking water.

Harvey Sellner and Ed Erdman brought to Venezuela 50 donated water purification units, which had been refurbished by Newtown Rotarians Skip Nelson and Fred Parrella. The WHT team installed five in a hospital and taught the local people how to install the rest of the systems where needed.

“The goal is to help people through the use of available technology – teaching them how to use it,” Mr Osterman explained.

The WHT Foundation volunteers were assisted by the Cisneros Foundation, a foundation created by the Cisneros Company, one of the largest companies in Venezuela.

“AmeriCares made the arrangements with the Cisneros Foundation so that we could get a helicopter and a translator,” Mr Sellner said. “We were driven in a military vehicle in the mountain valley covered by 50 to 100 feet of rubble everywhere you looked. The military had heavy equipment, earth moving equipment, and also water trucks delivering water to the villages. But we’re trying to take the existing water, treat it, and make it drinkable.”

“There were a lot of broken sewers. The stench of that and decaying bodies was awful,” he said.

Oceanfront resort hotels along the coast were buried up to their third stories by the mud that slid down the mountain range that parallels the coast. Entire villages of shacks perched on the sides of the mountains were obliterated.

“There is really no good count of the number of dead,” Mr Osterman said. “If everyone in a village is killed and buried there is no one left to tell the authorities.”

Mr Sneller said the young soldier who was his driver barely escaped with his life when mud began to fill the multi-story building that he was in. The soldier went floor to floor to escape the mud and was the last person plucked from the roof by a helicopter before the mud flowed over it.

“Everyone still there died,” he said.

Normal rainfall in Venezuela is about 900 centimeters a year. In two days in mid-February, the region got 1,500 centimeters of rain, triggering massive mudslides on the mountain range.

“The mudslides completely destroyed the town of Carmen de Urio where there is a university branch with 1,700 students,” Mr Sellner said. “There had been warnings but it was the day before elections. The politicians were saying ‘take your shoes off and vote,’ so many of the people didn’t take the warnings seriously. But if there was good news, it was that the mudslides happened during the week when so many of the people weren’t at their weekend homes along the coast.”

Tucker Lee, director of the Cisneros Foundation, was in Newtown last week to speak to the Rotarians about the work done in Venezuela. He explained that an additional system has been engineered and designed to bring water from a mountain stream to a central location about 600 feet away and to a remote area 800 feet away and up on the side of the mountain. The WHT Foundation expects the cost of replacing the water distribution system to exceed $8,000.

The lack of safe drinking water is the single biggest health problem in the world, Mr Osterman said.

“We want to show that safe drinking water can be available anywhere in the world and that everyone has a right to it,” Mr Sellner said.

A retired aerospace engineer, Harvey Sellner said the volunteer work he is doing through the Rotary and the WHT has taken over his life and given it real meaning.

In Ghana, the Rotary is setting up water purification systems in clinics, hospitals, and schools. Computers, medical supplies, and books also were donated. The venture started three years ago in Haiti, where the Rotarians helped a local order of nuns establish a clinic. To quickly respond to emergencies around the world, the WHT was set as an independent foundation to work with other emergency aid groups.

“There is so much need,” Mr Osterman said. “If anyone would like to have any additional information about the WHT Foundation or would like to help them in their efforts to make a better life for the many people who are currently suffering in the world, they are urged to call 270-7853.”