Alumni using skills, resources to help

All around the country and world, people are finding creative ways to help those in need amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A few Roanoke College alumni are getting involved, using their skills and resources to make a difference. Whether it’s donating supplies or manufacturing new products, Maroons are doing what they can to keep their communities as healthy as possible.

From rum leftovers to hand sanitizer

Distilleries around the country are using leftover alcohol from the distilling process to create hand sanitizer during the pandemic, and Brendan O’Donnell ‘09 wanted to follow suit. O’Donnell, the CEO and one of the owners of Newport Craft Brewing and Distilling in Newport, Rhode Island, said it’s been an exercise in problem solving to produce hand sanitizer for the community.

That problem-solving process ended up involving eBay, 100 pounds of aloe plants and turkey basters.

Hand sanitizer is relatively simple — it’s about two-thirds alcohol and one-third aloe vera. The distillery had just finished its rum production and had plenty of unused alcohol. But finding the aloe, and bottling it all up, was harder than it seemed.

“We had the alcohol, but we couldn’t find any bottles or any aloe vera,” O’Donnell said.

The distillery employees needed large supplies of aloe, and didn’t want to clear out the stocks at  local pharmacies. They were able to find a decent amount, but soon ran out. One of the distillery employees then went to Home Depot and bought 100 pounds of aloe plants, O’Donnell said, and slowly began extracting the aloe from them.

O’Donnell then went on eBay and bid on empty bottles in order to get them. As a result, the hand sanitizer comes in a variety of small mismatched bottles. They also didn’t have tools to put the liquid into the little bottles, so employees have been filling them, slowly, using turkey basters. Employees have been working from home to maintain social distancing, O’Donnell said. One of the distillery employees goes around and picks up the bottles.

The efforts and creativity resulted in about 1,500 four-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer. On April 6, the distillery will begin donating them to local organizations including the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Newport, which gives lower-income families a chance to grocery shop for free. The distillery will also be giving bottles to the local fire department and will set up places where people can pick up two bottles at a time.

Newport is a similar size to Salem, Virginia, O’Donnell said. The distillery is planning to produce more hand sanitizer, and might distribute to nearby communities.

“It’s difficult because we don’t know how long the crisis is going to go on for,” O’Donnell said. “The first thing we wanted to do was make enough for our community.”

Creating a 'print farm'

Suffolk County, on Long Island, New York, is located n one of the hardest-hit areas of the country. As of Friday, there were nearly 10,000 confirmed cases of the COVID-19  in the county.

Stony Brook University Hospital is working overtime to treat the flood of patients, and health care workers are doing everything they can to stay safe. They’re using PPE face shields to protect themselves, but the hospital can barely keep up with the demand.

That’s where Roger Reyes ‘88 came in.

Reyes, the assistant director of the Suffolk Cooperative Library System, read a blog post about a library system in upstate New York that was using 3D printers to build face shield parts. He knew that the Suffolk County Library System had a few 3D printers and wondered if they could do the same. He called the hospital and eventually spoke with David Ecker in Stony Brook University’s iCREATE Lab, which produces tech products for the university. 

Ecker told Reyes that the 15 3D printers on site were producing about 40 PPE face shields per day.

“Their goal was to do 5,000 of them,” Reyes said. “I can do math, and at 40 a day, it’s going to take them a really, really long time.”

Reyes sent a message around to staff in the 56 libraries in the county asking if they’d be able to fire up their 3D printers to help. Within 48 hours, the libraries had gathered 58 3D printers and were pumping out the plastic parts. As of this Thursday, April 2, there were 68 printers at work and Reyes said they’ll be getting 17 more this weekend. 

Reyes refers to the massive collection of 3D printers as a “print farm;” the farm is producing about 200 parts per day. The library printers are only producing the headband part of the face shield (the full shield is then constructed at the iCREATE Lab), but they’re greatly speeding the process up for lab’s production of face shields. As of April 2, the library printers have provided nearly 1,000 of the face shield parts, Reyes said.

Staff at the Suffolk County libraries— mandated to be closed until at least April 19 — were itching to help out, Reyes said. He pointed out that during major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012, libraries are usually heavily involved in helping people get back on their feet. Today, with in-person contact is essentially forbidden, libraries can’t be hands-on helpers.

Printing these PPE parts and helping to keep medical workers safe, Reyes said, is the kind of opportunity library staff were looking for. Reyes didn’t want to take much credit.

“The libraries are doing them collectively,” he  said. “I just have the physical space and the ability to organize.”