Raised Brow on Hexayurts
by Vinay Gupta • September 20, 2007 • Hexayurt • 4 Comments
Raised Brow is blogging about Hexayurts. I responded with some expansions.
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.
http://disastr.org
Is the site we made that describes the plan. Please click the link and learn more about our plans for protecting Americans in disasters.
I’m down with the hexayurt idea but the phone plan is waaaay out there and I don’t know that many people would be willing to foot the bill for it.
Members of the amateur radio service are around when disasters strike and have gotten pretty efficient at passing simple messages in and out of a disaster zone. They are expected to be able to pass simple traffic to let loved ones know they are ok and where they are.
One of the other lessons of Katrina is that most people are dishonest when they get handouts. They will buy things that they don’t need just because the money is there. They have no sense of prioritization or proper long-term planning. Those FEMA checks were an awful waste. I think the same thing would happen with free cell phones.
For getting messages out, I think it is far more likely that kiosks could be set up with limited low-speed internet access, just for email. Passing plain text email traffic uses very little bandwidth compared to cell phones or voice radio. If you have a population of 6 million people living in yurts with no job to go to and nothing to do but sit around, they will bring even the most advanced cell phone network to its knees. Email, though? That’s easy by comparison.
Sure, you need an economic model for the bandwidth utilization. You start by prioritizing data – mainly travel directions to your hexayurt! – over voice traffic.
As for the cost of the phones etc. the thing is this: it’s *incredibly* cheap compared to the alternatives. A basic cell phone has a real cost of about $10, and a purchase order for a national reserve of, say, half a million phones would be pretty cheap all in all.
On FEMA checks and so on? It was pennies. The ration of waste from personal spending of FEMA cheques, to money that was spend providing services which completely did not fit the situation?
That’s the real waste: government spending that benefits nobody. The FEMA cheques? You trust the people to make up their own mind for themselves, not for some government bureaucrat to decide what is good for them.
Or you decide that central planning is The Way.
That’s really my thesis here: institutionalized waste and inefficiency is massively worse than any possible personal wastage of a FEMA cheque. Government waste is measured in tens, in hundreds of billions.
Better to let people decide for themselves, in almost all cases, I say.
I think one of the real failures in Katrina that no one dare discuss (because casting any blame on the victims is politically incorrect) is that the overwhelming majority of people showed up at shelters empty handed. No fresh water. No food. Nothing.
There needs to be a real attitude adjustment. The government and NGO’s may be able to provide some relief within a few days of an event occurring, but really nobody is going to take care of you with as much personal interest as yourself. Have a bag ready to go for every member of the family with some water, some non-perishable food, and other resources.
The Red Cross and DHS have been trying in vain to convince Americans of this since the failures of Katrina surfaced. They have actively promoted sites like http://ready.gov but I suspect the next major disaster will reveal that nobody took that advice to heart.
People who prepare are considered paranoid, and that’s a taboo we must attack head-on in this society. Being prepared isn’t paranoid so much as prudent. We only live so comfortably because of this tremendous infrastructure that depends on everything being just right and in alignment. Screw up a couple of key elements of the infrastructure and it all comes crashing down. How long can you get by without the infrastructure up and running?
The same government that brought us the snafu in Iraq and bankrolled Osama bin Laden’s operations in the 1980’s cannot be expected to do a good job at preparing efficiently for disasters. NGO’s like the Red Cross stand a much better chance at doing this right. And even they recognize that they are too big to do it all themselves, and work closely with smaller NGO’s to fill in the gaps. But the biggest gap at all remains: the attitude of the average American about preparedness.
Sure. But the deeper disconnect is that the government tells us it can do everything, in return for half of our income.
Can the government really stand up and say “look, we’re talking half of your money, but when the shit hits the fan, we’re not coming?”
No. It can’t. In preserving the illusion of omnicompetence, the government makes people reliant on it, and then can’t deliver.
We needed the government at this size, arguably at least, to get through the 20th century. Income tax was introduced in 1913 essentially to blow the government up to fight the First World War, and we can’t deny its utility in WW2 and the Cold War.
But now the game has changed radically, and it’s not clear to me, at all, that the Federal Government has a future in its current form.
I’ve seen lack of communication between DoD, DHS and State *wreck* my life. I got deported in January, after presenting the mass evac plan, after presenting on appropriate technology at the Pentagon to very senior people, after having People Who Should Know state how important my work is. It’s a joke: everybody is responsible for their own piece of the puzzle, but nobody takes overall responsibility for Doing The Right Thing.
That function is supposed to be the “emergent property” of the whole, but in fact it’s failed – we’ve got a pile of bricks, but no house.
The systemic failure of the Federal government is visible on all sides: the only question is, “is anybody left able to call havoc and start fixing it, or is it going to collapse in the federal spending implosion which looms nigh upon us?”