MAKING TROUBLED WATERS POTABLE

LIKE A LEAD GUITARIST WHO CAN belt out a winning song while picking away at his instrument, Gregory S. AUgood, director of the Children's Safe Drinking Water program at Procter & Gamble, is deft at telling the ongoing story of the Cincinnati- based company's flagship humanitarian project while stirring an earthy powder from a ketchup-packet-size sachet into ajar filled with filthy, turbid, brown water. His song is all about one of the company's most welcome commercial flops. At the American Chemical Society's national meeting last month in Atlanta, Allgood chronicled how P&G's now 11-year-old project has grown into a global operation to provide millions of households with a dirt-cheap means of purifying the drinking water that has been sickening and killing them. Every day, diarrhea resulting from bad water kills several thousand children around the world and sickens many more, according to statistics from UNICEF, the United Nations' arm devoted to children's well-being. As Allgood ...