Throughout ITT, there was a strong passion to help earthquake survivors in Haiti. With ITT Watermark®, there was a system to make it happen in a hurry.
March 8, 2010, HAITI – On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti. It was the most powerful quake to strike this small island country in more than 200 years, and even before the aftershocks had subsided, ITT’s emergency relief response was in motion.
Within hours of the natural disaster, members of the ITT Watermark emergency response team were receiving early reports of the vast devastation in Haiti. The team was formed several years ago as part of the ITT Watermark philanthropy program to monitor global disasters and decide where and how ITT could make a difference.
Money for Mercy Corps
Less than an hour after reading the first situation report, the team released $100,000 to its front-line partner, Mercy Corps, for the formation of on-site teams that could assess the situation and begin rebuilding damaged water systems in the worst-hit sections.
As news spread throughout the world, ITT employees began sending donations to a dedicated Haiti site on the ITT Watermark webpage. Inside a week, they gave more than $130,000 of their own money to the cause, and with ITT’s increased matching program, nearly $400,000 in additional donations made its way to Mercy Corps.
Water systems to support 200,000 people
Simultaneously, on another front, the ITT Watermark team coordinated the delivery into Haiti of five water treatment units and reverse osmosis units that would work in tandem to treat contaminated water and remove the salt that was seeping into many of the wells in Port-au-Prince.
To speed delivery of the reverse osmosis units, two groups of Residential and Commercial Water employees in Dallas, Texas and Auburn, New York worked around the clock – redesigning on the fly so the units could be made with available parts, testing the finished units through the night and coordinating with suppliers and shippers.
“We prepared instructions with actual photos to improve the odds that the units could be properly set up and operated once they were in Haiti – and to make it even easier, we are working on translating our English-language instructions into French and Spanish,” says Mike Van Dyke, the Reverse Osmosis Engineer who led the team in Dallas, Texas.
Once on the ground, these combined systems can supply enough water to support approximately 200,000 people.
Reaching out to ITT family members
While the ITT Watermark efforts were under way, ITT’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Loranger sent out an e-mail to all employees updating them of the situation. Employees were reminded they could help through donations and that ITT wanted to help them by using its resources to find and aid any family members they might have in Haiti.
Working with a frontline security operations partner, ITT quickly organized a trip into Haiti to deliver food, water, medical supplies and transportation to medical facilities to ITT family members. More than 100 ITT employee relatives received daily aid from the ITT relief team.
In addition, six relatives were evacuated from Haiti to receive needed medical care and be reunited with their family members in the United States. One of them was eight-month-old Eisha Perez Buissereth, the niece of Chloé Guirand, who works for ITT’s Water and Wastewater business in Trumbull, Connecticut.
Eisha was evacuated because of her age, but it was quickly discovered by ITT’s medical team that she had pneumonia. “She probably wouldn’t have made it if she stayed in Haiti,” says Alan Leibowitz, Director of Employee, Health, Safety and Security, who was part of the evacuation team.
Frantz Simon, an employee for ITT’s Electronic Systems business in Amityville, New York, now has an aunt, uncle and cousin living with him until they – and their country – recover enough for a safe return.
