Host: Dave McGimpsey
Guest: Cameron Craig | Former Water Lab Director | US Army
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[13:18] “What a lot of people don't recognize […] [is] to sustain a fighting force, you have to have the elements to sustain human life. So you got to have water, you got to have food, you got to have services that are going to be able to keep your soldiers healthy, both while they're at home on their installations and while they're out […] fighting wars. And keeping soldiers healthy, is not just about supplying guns and tanks and bullets, you've also got to make sure that those people have […] good, clean running water.”
[15:00] “The experience on a installation from a water perspective [is] definitely collaborative, because […] in addition to just your regular water utility people, you also have people that are very concerned about the safety and the health of the force. […] Because, as opposed to where you'd normally in a small town have threats from line breaks and things like that. You add on to that […] the threat of an actual intentional terrorist attack or enemy attack. So there's people that are focused specifically on that as well. So […] we collaborate with them closely to make sure that all of our assets, and all of our people, and the systems are secured and are providing clean, safe water that's going to be resilient into the future.”
[17:15] “I actually worked in the Public Health Department at Fort Riley, Kansas. […] And I think it's a really important function that public health departments and preventive med departments carry out on most installations. They're associated with the hospital or the clinic on the installation. And they have kind of an outside role coming in to do quality assurance and quality control, to make sure that the water that's actually being provided is essentially up to snuff. That it is clean, that it doesn't have any bacterial contamination, that the pH and chlorine are correct, essentially, as kind of a third party reviewer, to what the water utility is doing.”
[19:08] “There's a much more intimate knowledge of the community health on military installations. Because all the people that live there work for the military, and they're gonna get their medical care also from the military. So there's a better understanding of how COVID and any pandemics can affect that community and the impact that's having. We were actually able on Fort Riley to implement a wastewater based epidemiology project, where we were able to track the COVID dynamics as they move through our population and actually build predictive models to be able to tell leaders […] you've got a 60% chance in the next so many days of having a spike in COVID cases based on this wastewater data that we're seeing. So it's very informative, and provided those leaders the ability to […] make decisions for the protection of the force. That was, I think, essential.”
[29:16] “Sustainability is something that the military's been focused on heavily […] in […] the last probably 10 to 20 years. Because they understand that the ability to maintain their force is dependent on being good stewards to the resources that they're using. So water is one of those things. And it's important to […] monitor and refine the sustainable operations for water specifically, because what you want to make sure is that […] if you're sending troops out into the field, that that water's being produced effectively, and it's being used effectively as well.”
Rating: 💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 40 min | 🗓️ 11/02/2021
✅ Time saved: 38 min
