Follow-up to Hexayurt
Hey Everyone, It looks like Vinay Gupta, the designer of the Hexayurt found out I blogged about it, and posted an addendum. I have it copied below for your reading pleasure. The more curious I got about this, I had to test it myself. I whipped out some 2.5″x5″ Index Cards, and the always abundant Electrical tape and made a rough model. Check it out. It’s pretty sturdy, even with my bad taping/construction methods. I can see living in one of these for awhile.
Hi, Vinay here, designer of the Hexayurt.
For disaster relief in America, we have a plan. It’s a good plan, according to both the American Red Cross and FEMA.
Here’s how it works. You got four things you need to put together when it comes to rehousing a person in a hexayurt in a disaster. Those four things are:
* the person who needs shelter while the situation calms down
* a household who’ll give them a place to put the hexayurt, and provide access to a toilet, a shower, and electricity etc.
* the raw materials to make the hexayurt. Every day the building industry in the US uses enough to make 120,000 hexayurts, enough to shelter 600,000 people.
So we have a plan for using a distributed database to connect these resources in a disaster. It’s something that Amazon, Google or Yahoo - or any number of other big internet companies - have the hardware and software to do.
Then we need a way of making sure that you can get access to the database and find your way to where you need to get to. Two ways of doing that.
* Pre-printed emergency response plans, or
* A dynamic system you connect to over the cell phone network, coupled with emergency cell systems.An emergency cell system is a national supply of free cell phones, and mobile cell towers made to be helicoptered into disaster areas, with self-contained power and satellite links to carry the calls.
Expensive, but necessary. When something happens, you fly in the emergency towers, and give anybody who doesn’t have their phone with them a phone. It’s that simple.
On the phone, there’s a link to the “where do I go to find a shelter?” link, and it takes the GPS data from the phone, and guides you to a place where a volunteer host family, raw materials, and some builders all coincide to give you a nice new place to live.
There are three goals here:
* reduce the load on first responders, like the fire service
* enable the people involved in a really huge disaster to get shelter, to prevent more Superdome type scenarios
* to built self-reliance as a key part of disaster response
We’ve learned, from Katrina, that the Federal Government is not well suited to doing disaster response in the US. It’s got too many separate departments, too many rules, too much bureaucratic slowness and all other kinds of problems. And that’s not something we can reasonably expect to change: you make a machine to do one job well (handle ordinary times) and you can’t expect it to suddenly do well in a massive crisis.
Is the site we made that describes the plan. Please click the link and learn more about our plans for protecting Americans in disasters.
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