This blog post was written by Walt Vernon, a member of Sextant's board of directors and the CEO of Mazzetti.
As many of you know, in addition to my work with Mazzetti, I do a lot of volunteer work through a non-profit I created called the Sextant Foundation. That work is generally focused on helping strengthen the facility infrastructure for healthcare organizations in low-resourced areas.
After the hurricane in the Bahamas, I led a team of engineers to assess some of the public health facilities - one of two hospitals in the country and several primary care clinics on Abaco Island. We worked in partnership with two more wonderful organizations, the SBP and Project Hope. We have done a lot of work through Project Hope through the years, including ongoing work in Puerto Rico. SBP was formed after Hurricane Katrina, and has a team of dedicated volunteers on site right now, trying to help the hospital deal with their mold challenges. Our volunteers for this mission included Samantha Sharp of Sherwood Engineers, Sean Brice, of TCI Engineers, Deborah Czubkowski of Broward College, and Scott Czubkowski of Medexcel. It was a great team, and they continue to help even though all have returned to their real jobs.
The facilities in the Bahamas have been hard hit, and the hospital was submerged under several feet of water, and is now suffering from mold issues. The island has many organizations now helping them, but there is an urgent need to get the hospital functioning again, as well as to provide sustainable, resilient water and power systems for the primary care clinics. We are working with SBP to try to raise the money and volunteers needed for to get this done. (for more, see the excellent PBS piece.
For this hospital to recover, we need to help them with mold remediation especially the ductwork. This will be an expensive effort, and we are trying to find people who might be able to help. We are also looking for people to help us with installation of RO systems at various primary care clinics on Abaco. And, always, we are looking for financial contributions to help with supplies and materials.
I am just an engineer, and I am not much of a fund-raiser. But I hope people who can help, will help. You can reach out to me directly, or through www.sextantfoundation.org. I thank you, but more importantly, the people of the Bahamas thank you.