LUBBOCK, Texas – Hundreds of people in our community are coming together to protect our health care workers who are doing everything they can to help us. Right now they are in need of personal protection equipment. Texas Tech is teaming up with the District Attorney’s office and many more people to help them out.

“Everyone I reached out to in this area like I expected, everyone is just like come on, bring it to me we will help anyway we can,” said Todd Smith, District Attorney Chief investigator.

Engineers are making ventilators and volunteers are using 3-D printers to make face shields and intubation chambers.

“It’s an honor to be able to do something like that take everything that we’ve learned.Obviously situation isn’t ideal, but the fact that we’re able to do anything to help this is a blessing,” said Preston Abadie, engineering student at TTU who else helping with the ventilators.

They hope to give all nine big cities in West Texas 100 to 1000 face shields and around 10 intubation chambers. For the 75 smaller cities they’re donating whatever they need.

“We think we can make at least a small difference to them,” said Simon Williams, Texas Texas School of Medicine Academic Affairs Associate Dean.

Those goals should be met by then end of next week. The engineers also coming up with faster, cheaper ways to make ventilators right here in our backyards until more become available.

“All this does is essentially manually activates it so a nurse doesn’t have to do it themselves. So there is a holder here for the bag itself and then a motor which just moves this back and forth,” said Hans Hudynica, engineering student at TTU who else helping with the ventilators.

Once they are made, more volunteers come in and make the deliveries to all the hospital.

“You are talking about to Snyder up to Plainview and from out west in Morton all the way to Crosbyton so we covered that whole area with the map it was 13 different hospitals. It’s West Texas that is a lot of miles but we got it done by lunch,” said Smith.

If you would like to help out you can go to their website here.