BLACKSBURG -- When footage of flood-ravaged communities captured the nation's attention following Hurricane Katrina, most people didn't think about a lack of water.

But Rafael Gonzalez did.

The co-owner of Portaqua couldn't help but witness the devastation and wonder how residents would get safe, clean drinking water.

Had Katrina struck just a few weeks later, Gonzalez might have been in a position to provide some.

At the end of the month, Portaqua will enter the market with a lightweight, portable water purification system whose design lends itself to disaster relief, Gonzalez said.

Roughly 5 feet by 5 feet and 1,000 pounds, the system can take untreated city water or water from rivers, lakes and oceans and produce between 3,000 and 10,000 gallons of potable water a day. The units can also bottle the water.

But disaster relief wasn't the obvious use when Gonzalez first approached Jim Flowers, director of VT KnowledgeWorks, a business incubator in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

"Rafael's original business plan was to position these as for the entrepreneurial guy in Mexico who does water sales and production in a small village," Flowers said.

"The fact that these units are uniquely portable and would have been just wonderful to have in the time of the tsunami and Katrina is coincidental."

There are currently four systems operating in various parts of Mexico, where they have undergone testing since January. After their debut at a convention in Orlando, Fla., the $25,000 to $37,000 purifiers will be sold for use in emergencies as well as in hotels, hospitals and manufacturing plants. The systems will be assembled in a facility in Puebla, Mexico.

Gonzalez said the design was inspired by residents of impoverished countries without access to safe water.

In 2002, 1.1 billion people lacked access to improved water sources, according to the World Health Organization.

As a marketing manager with what is now Calgon Carbon Corp., Gonzalez witnessed the problem firsthand.

"The first time I realized how difficult the water issues in the world are, I was traveling in Peru," he said. "It was the first time I really saw water that was not very good for people's health -- especially for children -- and yet, this is what the villages had in Peru."

Ed Baruth, of the American Water Works Association in Denver, Colo., said the cost of water treatment units is often prohibitive to developing nations.

But price isn't the only thing that's kept water purifiers from being more widely used. Often, systems are complicated to run, requiring some expertise for operation and maintenance.

Gonzalez said that 10 months ago, he and business partner Max Junghanns began looking for ways to downsize and simplify the process.

They partnered with Rockwell Automation and TriSep Corp. to develop a system that coordinates multiple components at the push of a button.

With other systems, "someone has to know each step of the process," Gonzalez said. "Ours you really don't -- you just need two things: electricity and water."

In an informational video, a merchant and his wife fill bottle after bottle of newly purified water in Atlixco, Mexico. Neither has to worry about the removal of hydrocarbon contamination or pathogens or reverse osmosis for purification. They simply remove filled bottles and replace them with empty ones.

This simplicity -- and the fact that the system can be assembled and operational within four to eight hours -- is what makes the purifier so useful in a disaster.

"For me, it's one of those immediately attractive notions for several reasons," Flowers explained. "It's in a marketplace that is never going to get smaller water's an issue worldwide ... the size and cost is totally in reach of villages and poor places and because of the way it works, it can be an entrepreneurial thing with someone rather than a government investment."

Portaqua has been a member of KnowledgeWorks since mid-January.