Delivering Water in Hard-To-Reach Places
By: Roger Slavens | Categories: Alumni Interest
When an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, Benjamin Cohen and fellow student Apoorv Sinha came up with an idea to provide mobile infrastructure to places hit hard by natural disasters. They designed a flexible tubing system—employing coiled, high-density polyethylene—that can be efficiently and economically installed by helicopter over long distances quickly across virtually any type of terrain. Joined by two more undergraduates, Travis Horsley and Melissa McCoy, their team fared well in student innovation competitions at Tech and then they sought funding across the globe. They received their first financing of $40,000 from Startup Chile, filed a patent for the idea and incorporated as TOHL—short for Tubing Operations for Human Logistics. One of the company’s first projects was to help the isolated community of Diego De Almagro, located in the deserts of northern Chile, where mudslides had taken out key infrastructure and water trucks couldn’t reach the city. “We were able to install a water line and pull water from the water trucks and send it to their main water supply,” Cohen says. Since then, Atlanta-based TOHL has been involved in numerous emergency responses in earthquake-prone Chile, built permanent and mobile water infrastructure systems in Nicaragua and Kenya, and has been contracted by a number of governmental agencies and businesses, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Bank, Coca-Cola and CSR. While his former Tech classmates have primarily moved onto other pursuits, Cohen continues to lead TOHL and is expanding its focus on new opportunities such as leveraging the technology for fighting forest fires and optimizing oil sands mining operations.
