UK aid sending shelter and water purifiers to help people left homeless by Indonesian disasters

The combination of a series of earthquakes, the largest with a 7.5 magnitude, and the resulting tsunami, has had devastating effects on the coastal city of Palu, Indonesia. Over 1,500 lives have already been lost as a result.

Almost 200,000 people have been left in need of urgent humanitarian assistance according to the UN, with more than 70,000 homes destroyed. As is always the case in the wake of these types of disasters, the basic essentials of live are suddenly in short supply. People are without shelter, food and water.

LifeSaver Cubes to give safe drinking water

A flight departed from Doncaster Sheffield Airport early on Thursday 4th October. This flight transported life-saving UK aid supplies from the Department for International Development (DFID) to the disaster zone. The supplies included shelter kits, as well as solar lanterns and water purifiers.

2,300 LifeSaver Cubes were stacked onto 16 pallets and loaded onto the aircraft set to deliver the much needed aid supplies. These 2,300 LifeSaver Cubes are each able to purify up to 5,000 litres of water for the families who receive them. That’s potentially 11.5 million litres of safe drinking water delivered through our water purifiers.

Were this amount of water to be bottled and transported, it would require well over 100 airplanes. Not only do our products save the huge costs of all those airplanes and flights, there are the environmental benefits to saving 11.5 million plastic water bottles which would be left over afterwards.

This family received a LifeSaver Cube in Feburary 2014, three months after typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines.

Department for International Development (DFID)

Footage of British explorer and ex-Army officer Levison Wood finding out about how DFID deploy our water purifiers can be seen here.

Here at LifeSaver we are immensely proud of our role in bringing safe drinking water to those who need it most. Our water purifiers were designed specifically with disaster response in mind. We remain committed to working with aid agencies and militaries to get our products to victims of disasters as early as possible.