What strikes me is the...confidence of finding water in the coming days. If it is confidence and not ignorance of how fast and how bad things will go without it.
You saw the deadfalls he had to climb over, just to move a couple miles. I don’t think there’s enough helicopters on earth to move that kind of water.
Clorox and coffee filters and lime.
I’ve never been involved in a post-hurricane recovery effort, but, let’s take a look at the water problem.
Assuming extra recovery personnel on Dominica, let’s figure total temporary population at 80,000. Most live near the coast, and there are various streams and small rivers also for bathing & washing clothes (at least assuming it’s not heavily raining all the time, but then one can collect abundant rain water — the island is in the rainy season w/ over 8” of rain typical, per month.) It’s a hot climate, so, we’ll go generous and assume potable water needs are 1.5 gal. per person per day, giving us a need for 120,000 gallons a day, or rounding up a bit, 1 million pounds of water a day. I found conflicting numbers on what a Chinook helicopter can carry — a conservative number seems to be 19,000 lbs. Say 2000 lbs of that is the packaging (probably a bit high an estimate): Each Chinook trip can carry 17,000 lbs. of water, and I’ll make a wild guess of 10 trips in a 24 hour period, giving us 170,000 lbs. of water per Chinook per day. So, we need 6 operational choppers at any one time, IF they are up to date Chinooks. Assign some other available choppers to carry in water purification supplies, rainwater gathering supplies, and so on, especially once rescue and recovery efforts are largely complete.
Possibly, some potable water can be brought in via small ships, as well, and if there are any good wells on the island, it should not take too long to get generators placed with them. A typical small well pump can do 20 gal/min. Even if running at 1/4 capacity, that’s 5 gal/min, or 7,200 gal/day — 20 pumps supply the island’s population fairly easily. (This also assumes the underground fresh water supply is generous, which it should be, given all that rain.)
This is quite doable.
Getting the debris out of the way so people can get to the water supplies is a bigger problem, at least the first few days.
Now, if large portions of Puerto Rico’s population are without fresh water infrastructure, THAT is a more daunting problem.