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First look: Clean water for Texas colonias

Summary

SOURCE Global, a public benefit organization, is collaborating with Texas politicians and charities to provide safe drinking water to many colonias, which are unincorporated, low-income areas with limited resources. The state's increasingly unpredictable water supply, which depends mainly on drought-stricken rivers and reservoirs, exacerbates existing hurdles to access for the majority of low-income Latino citizens living in colonias. A new pilot project managed by SOURCE Global aims to counteract this by installing solar-powered technology that generates clean drinking water for around 500 colonia houses in the El Paso and Maverick counties of Hueco Tanks and Quemado. SOURCE hydropanels absorb water vapor from the air, extracting only clean water molecules before condensing them into liquid, leaving pollutants behind, then converting those molecules into liquid water and adding calcium and magnesium. The total financing required to furnish the houses in the two colonias is anticipated to be about $3 million. They've already obtained $150,000 of that total, and they're hoping to receive the remainder via the NADB's Community Assistance Program.

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