popular logistics

James Risen reports in the Times of July 18th (Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said)  that

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.  Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

This isn’t, I think, what one hopes for in government efficiency: taking a defective and dangerous item which shouldn’t have been distributed in the first place - and giving them to a different set of disaster victims.

Doctor of Thinkology has an account here: “Love, FEMA.” The Doctor’s claims notwithstanding, there’s clearly no need for a diploma or a brain.

Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton reported last week in the Times that

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Advocates for public housing residents contended that HUD plan would not provide housing for all of the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Katrina, almost all of them black.

The Council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately and to rebuild all of the public housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said the Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

How much can FEMA get done in 19 months? It can not test trailers - occupied trailers - for formaldehyde, which it’s known about for that long.

Ralph Blumenthal follows up on this in the October 18th editions of The New York Times.

Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.

“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” - Representative Henry A. Waxman.

“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”

But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.

One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.

Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.

“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.

This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.

But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense.

Design for the other 90% The show we missed at the Cooper-Hewitt, the museum with the highest ration of cool-to-anonymity in New York City. Perhaps it’s actually a secret, classified facility - an “undisclosed cultural location.” Here’s what Design for the other 90% is about:

Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, 5.8 billion people, or 90%, have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted; in fact, nearly half do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. Design for the Other 90% explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for this “other 90%.” Through partnerships both local and global, individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor and marginalized.

Designers, engineers, students and professors, architects, and social entrepreneurs from all over the globe are devising cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them. And an increasing number of initiatives are providing solutions for underserved populations in developed countries such as the United States.

This movement has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when economists and designers looked to find simple, low-cost solutions to combat poverty. More recently, designers are working directly with end users of their products, emphasizing co-creation to respond to their needs. Many of these projects employ market principles for income generation as a way out of poverty. Poor rural farmers become micro-entrepreneurs, while cottage industries emerge in more urban areas. Some designs are patented to control the quality of their important breakthroughs, while others are open source in nature to allow for easier dissemination and adaptation, locally and internationally.

Encompassing a broad set of modern social and economic concerns, these design innovations often support responsible, sustainable economic policy. They help, rather than exploit, poorer economies; minimize environmental impact; increase social inclusion; improve healthcare at all levels; and advance the quality and accessibility of education. These designers’ voices are passionate, and their points of view range widely on how best to address these important issues. Each object on display tells a story, and provides a window through which we can observe this expanding field. Design for the Other 90% demonstrates how design can be a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world.

They’ve got a promising blog - which is particularly cool - we take as a sign that the Cooper-Hewitt means to keep this dialogue going notwithstanding the closing of the physical exhibit.

We’ve got the crack Popular Logistics “fixers” trying to persuade the press office at the Cooper-Hewitt that just because we’re a blog, we’re still part of the “press” for purpooses of showing our readers some images along with further posts about Design for the other 90%. Stay tuned for more.

Huntsville is setting up a shelter system - although there are no plans to provide food or bedding. What about light and heat? Medical care?

From Jay Reeves’ Associated Press article:

In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

From Commissioner Joseph Bruno’s announcement:

What if New York City were hit by a Category 3 Hurricane?

In New York City, over eight million people live on land that has 578 miles of waterfront. By 2030, the population is expected to reach nine million. At the same time, global climate change has put New York City at an increased risk for a severe coastal storm. In recent years, storms have become more intense, occur more frequently, and continue farther north than they have historically. The city would face many challenges during and after such a storm; one of the most difficult is the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their homes.

With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and in consultation with Architecture for Humanity-New York, the New York City Office of Emergency Management is sponsoring an open competition to generate solutions for post-disaster provisional housing. “What if New York City…” is a call for innovation and an opportunity for designers and policy-makers to collaborate on one of the biggest challenges facing densely settled urban areas after a disaster: how do we keep people safely and comfortably housed while reconstruction proceeds?

A jury of experts in the fields of architecture, design, urbanism, and government will choose ten entrants who will be awarded $10,000 each and technical support to develop their proposals into workable solutions. These solutions will provide support for New York’s most vulnerable communities and be a precedent for dense urban areas all over the world.

This design competition will rely on a fictional but realistic New York City neighborhood devastated by a hypothetical Category 3 hurricane.

Competition main page here.

Transmaterial reports that

The Concrete Canvas Shelter is a rapidly deployable hardened shelter that requires only water and air for erection. It can be deployed by two people without any training in approximately thirty minutes and is ready to use in twelve hours. The shelter consists of a cement-impregnated fabric (Concrete Cloth) bonded to the outer surface of an inflatable plastic inner structure.

Prior to construction, the shelter is delivered folded in a sealed plastic sack. Once the sack is positioned and filled with water, the fiber matrix wicks water into the cement, naturally controlling the water-to-cement ratio. The sack is cut open after hydration, and a battery-driven fan inflates the inner plastic lining, causing the structure to lift. After a duration of twelve hours, the concrete will have set sufficiently for use.

The fibers of the Concrete Canvas fabric form a coherent matrix within the concrete, providing tensile reinforcement and helping prevent crack propagation. If desired, the shelter can be buried with over 0.5 meters of sand on the roof in order to provide increased insulation and protection.

This system comes from Peter Brown at Concrete Canvas in Northampton, UK.

Thanks to Ryan Lanham at Identity Unknown for this.

S ustainable
T echnologies
A cceleration
N etwork for
D evelopment
A ssistance and
R apid
R elief
D eployment

STANDARRD Blog here.  This is, I gather, the product of Vinay Gupta, who invented the Hexayurt (Appropropedia entry here)

The Hexayurt, I understand, did good service in Hancock, Mississippi during Katrina. (Citation to be supplied).

NERT-the National Emergency Response Team - has a design for converting truck trailers into emergency housing for displaced persons or emergency workers:

Perhaps this is what FEMA should have prepositioned around the country.