because one world is plenty
Hexayurt Country: Implementation, Objections and Extensions
Yesterday evening, and just before today's #crisiscampldn, Vinay Gupta produced a 6 page document that's worth reading: http://bit.ly/haitiplan
At the core, it's about providing water, food, shelter and other things to 1 million people, fast and with a view to (re)building a country where there's now a place for lots of present and potential trouble.
If it's 1 hexayurt per 5 people, that's 200 thousand yurts, or 3.6 million sheets of plywood/OSB/whatever.
First objection: Plain plywood rots
Even if plain plywood lasts 1 year only, on average, and is then reused for fuel with good stoves, it's not at all lost, and saves that part of the island from some further deforestation. (Never tried burning a tent.)
A stretch hexayurt, spacious for 5 people, uses 18 4'x8' panels. So that would be a bit over 3 panels per person, or 10.69 square meters per person, which is fuel for some time. We'd need to look into minutes of boiling per gram of plywood, and that's a simple test that can be done with several different stoves, with results shared, please. (Update: Lanny Henson says 7 kg of beans cooked with 700 grams of bamboo. And that's not even counting "combined cooking", where heated-up food is kept inside a cushioned box for some time.)
And in 1 year we'd know which alternative survives and works best: plywood, OSB, or whatever.
Better plywood is expensive
Marine plywood is, according to wikipedia, 3 times the price of common plywood.
But hexayurt material is only a fraction of the cost. At $5 a sheet, and say 3.5 sheets per person, that's less than $20 per person. Triple that, and it's still $60 per person.
And the stoves, the solar panels, the toilets, the container gardens, etc, would all be there after a substantial part of the plywood has been burned and cheaply replaced with whatever works best.
Treat it as an experiment with wider implications
If 200k yurts are built, I'm quite sure it makes sense to try different things in different locations. Say cheap plywood for 10k yurts, marine plywood for 10k yurts, etc etc.
Maybe akvo can help with collecting funds for specific NGOs that try stuff out several hundred at a time?
There's room for #USGov, big NGOs, small NGOs, even #bop #socent if you ask me. First players and facilitating players. 1 million people served, many disasters and poverty left to serve after that.
In 6 months and then in 1 year, we'll know a whole lot more than we know today about what works best. And projects like @OSEcology will have moved along at full speed, maybe providing ways to do housing with dirt from the ground, cos in the long run nothing is either/or.
Container gardens
Speaking about container gardens, hexayurts are relocatable, so it really makes sense to have some of the food grown in container gardens.
Maybe there could be 10 square meters of container garden per person, providing some of what people need to sustain themselves with food.
Another 10 square meters per person would be for on-the-ground food growing, with fruit trees and nitrogen fixating trees and bamboo and what-not, all of which is left behind by people who eventually want to go back to the city, if they want to go back to the city at all.
Add 10 square meters per person for common areas, and say 20 square meters per person of street surface ...
This means a hexacamp needs 50 square meters per person, so a 10k people hexacamp uses 500k square meters, which is 500 meters by 1000 meters, and there would be about 100 such camps, surrounded by watercatching areas and forest areas using the #permaculture ways.
I could be wrong by at most an order of magnitude, so please challenge every assumption. There are figures about refugee camps in other places, so we can check whether this is reasonable, too crowded, or what.
Help map candidate locations
Maybe #cchaiti folks could help map this out, and even, with local expertise and a well defined set of criteria, find appropriate spots for this? We need 100 locations, so maybe 300 candidate locations?
Start with the first 5 today? Candidate locations would have room for people and crops and common surface, good slope for rain, etc.
#Permaculture relief corps (contact @gaiapunk and see http://permaculturehaiti.org) can provide lots of wisdom here, plus specific techniques such as swales, mulching etc etc etc. http://www.appropedia.org can provide wiki-space.
An extension: reforestation
Finally, a word about reforestation. There's this crazy picture of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, with no trees on one side and a tropical forest on the other.
Map folks can help us all know how much forest surface there is in the DR, and how much there could be in Haiti. Then, it could be a matter of suggesting the DR, with a similar ecology, donates 1 branch per tree for reforestation.
Add watercatching techniques and so on, and in a couple of years, things might look different indeed.
What else?
What other ideas can we collect to try and make things work? What's here that needs to be challenged, refined or connected to other things that also need to happen or need to be taken into consideration?
This can be done. Only it's not done yet. We have barely started.
At the core, it's about providing water, food, shelter and other things to 1 million people, fast and with a view to (re)building a country where there's now a place for lots of present and potential trouble.
If it's 1 hexayurt per 5 people, that's 200 thousand yurts, or 3.6 million sheets of plywood/OSB/whatever.
First objection: Plain plywood rots
Even if plain plywood lasts 1 year only, on average, and is then reused for fuel with good stoves, it's not at all lost, and saves that part of the island from some further deforestation. (Never tried burning a tent.)
A stretch hexayurt, spacious for 5 people, uses 18 4'x8' panels. So that would be a bit over 3 panels per person, or 10.69 square meters per person, which is fuel for some time. We'd need to look into minutes of boiling per gram of plywood, and that's a simple test that can be done with several different stoves, with results shared, please. (Update: Lanny Henson says 7 kg of beans cooked with 700 grams of bamboo. And that's not even counting "combined cooking", where heated-up food is kept inside a cushioned box for some time.)
And in 1 year we'd know which alternative survives and works best: plywood, OSB, or whatever.
Better plywood is expensive
Marine plywood is, according to wikipedia, 3 times the price of common plywood.
But hexayurt material is only a fraction of the cost. At $5 a sheet, and say 3.5 sheets per person, that's less than $20 per person. Triple that, and it's still $60 per person.
And the stoves, the solar panels, the toilets, the container gardens, etc, would all be there after a substantial part of the plywood has been burned and cheaply replaced with whatever works best.
Treat it as an experiment with wider implications
If 200k yurts are built, I'm quite sure it makes sense to try different things in different locations. Say cheap plywood for 10k yurts, marine plywood for 10k yurts, etc etc.
Maybe akvo can help with collecting funds for specific NGOs that try stuff out several hundred at a time?
There's room for #USGov, big NGOs, small NGOs, even #bop #socent if you ask me. First players and facilitating players. 1 million people served, many disasters and poverty left to serve after that.
In 6 months and then in 1 year, we'll know a whole lot more than we know today about what works best. And projects like @OSEcology will have moved along at full speed, maybe providing ways to do housing with dirt from the ground, cos in the long run nothing is either/or.
Container gardens
Speaking about container gardens, hexayurts are relocatable, so it really makes sense to have some of the food grown in container gardens.
Maybe there could be 10 square meters of container garden per person, providing some of what people need to sustain themselves with food.
Another 10 square meters per person would be for on-the-ground food growing, with fruit trees and nitrogen fixating trees and bamboo and what-not, all of which is left behind by people who eventually want to go back to the city, if they want to go back to the city at all.
Add 10 square meters per person for common areas, and say 20 square meters per person of street surface ...
This means a hexacamp needs 50 square meters per person, so a 10k people hexacamp uses 500k square meters, which is 500 meters by 1000 meters, and there would be about 100 such camps, surrounded by watercatching areas and forest areas using the #permaculture ways.
I could be wrong by at most an order of magnitude, so please challenge every assumption. There are figures about refugee camps in other places, so we can check whether this is reasonable, too crowded, or what.
Help map candidate locations
Maybe #cchaiti folks could help map this out, and even, with local expertise and a well defined set of criteria, find appropriate spots for this? We need 100 locations, so maybe 300 candidate locations?
Start with the first 5 today? Candidate locations would have room for people and crops and common surface, good slope for rain, etc.
#Permaculture relief corps (contact @gaiapunk and see http://permaculturehaiti.org) can provide lots of wisdom here, plus specific techniques such as swales, mulching etc etc etc. http://www.appropedia.org can provide wiki-space.
An extension: reforestation
Finally, a word about reforestation. There's this crazy picture of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, with no trees on one side and a tropical forest on the other.
Map folks can help us all know how much forest surface there is in the DR, and how much there could be in Haiti. Then, it could be a matter of suggesting the DR, with a similar ecology, donates 1 branch per tree for reforestation.
Add watercatching techniques and so on, and in a couple of years, things might look different indeed.
What else?
What other ideas can we collect to try and make things work? What's here that needs to be challenged, refined or connected to other things that also need to happen or need to be taken into consideration?
This can be done. Only it's not done yet. We have barely started.
Views: 43
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on -
Update: I've looked at Lanny Henson's youtube video (see main post) and it looks like 700 grams of bamboo can cook 7 kilograms of water and beans. That's not even counting the possibility of using combined cooking, with cushioned boxes. So we have at least 10 grams of food per 1 gram of bamboo. Would plywood be the same? I don't know, but I'll use that as a working hypothesis.
This means that, even if plywood rots eventually, at that time it can be used for cooking. How much cooking?
3.6 panels per person is 10.69 square meters per person. Maybe 5 kg per square meter of plywood? That would be 50 kg of plywood per person, enough to cook 500 or more kg of food. If people need to cook 1 kg a day of food, that's enough wood for more than 1 year.
This is what "not all is lost" and "permaculture" and "systems thinking" and "design" means.
More objections, please!
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Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on -
The calculation will be affected by the process of rotting. The wood oxidizes, and so by the end you have less weight of wood (some has crumbled or decomposed to CO2) and the remainder is already partly oxidized.
I love the fact that you're doing analysis and calculations, and putting it online. Even if certain points don't work out, those calculations may help another person asking the same questions.
It's all going to go on Appropedia, right?
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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Yes please! Whatever I contribute is public domain by default, in case anyone wonders. Which means it's appropedia friendly.
I think there's room for a research team flocking around this, particularly if we get to see at least one hexayurt town in Haiti. I can almost imagine a hexayurt-like crisis-camp virtual gathering, with people grabbing whatever is learned and shaping it into a science-like format, aka neat wikipages.
Grumble, grumble, must leave my dayjob for a couple of months to do this, grumble, grumble.
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Permalink Reply by Lisa on -
Treated plywood would not be good cooking fuel because of the chemicals that would be released when it is burned
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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This has to be tested, with different chemicals and different stoves.
I _hope_ it is tested.
Even if hexayurts were to be deployed big time in Haiti, which might or might not happen, then Haiti would just be a test bed for other locations, and yes, we want to know.
I think the worldstove folks - http://twitter.com/worldstove or I may have the link wrong - have testing procedures which could be used. A "clinical" test, without the precise double digit figures coming out of a tester machine, is smell and disease.
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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I translated http://bit.ly/haitiplan into Spanish. It's at http://www.appropedia.org/Pais_Hexayurt
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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Numbers (in M$) for 200k yurts:
- plywood = 18 (30% of the total, so if it's more expensive then it's just this part that's more expensive; part becomes fuel if and when it becomes unusable for shelter; missing part can be rebought if housing problem persists) (fancy imagining how many ships that means?)
- work = 20 (most is local, a benefit for the local economy; remaking is done by locals who own the problem)
- filter = 4
- stove = 4
- solar = 4
- toilet = 8
- chlorine = 2
(It adds up to 60M$, yes.)
Is there so much stuff in the supply chain?
If not, there should be, for this and other disasters (poverty included).
Should this be tried out with at least 5% of the people (one in twenty is 10k yurts, 2M$)? Yes.
And of course more is better. 50%? 100%? Other locations in the world?
Who has the muscle? I don't know. I mean, I don't know them personally. Do you?
----
Missing piece: for agriculture, much is just knowledge and work (see #permaculture), but it's also business, self-financed #bop way. See @oneacrefarm and @outofpoverty on twitter - they know.
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Permalink Reply by Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson on
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Just a note. Akvo.org is not really set up for emergency fund raising. We neither have the audience nor the connections to do this in a productive manner. Besides, we haven't started to do stuff outside of water and sanitation yet. In my view, there are plenty of organisations who are good at emergency fund raising.
Keep up the good work!
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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Hi Thomas,
Ok, it's just that I love the, hm, I don't know if I get it right, the modularity of the akvo approach. People being able to fund small projects.
In this particular instance, some people might want to fund marine plywood hexayurts, while others might prefer plain plywood hexayurts, in some sort of friendly competition to see which works better.
Cos, seriously, between some pairs of alternatives, sometimes we don't really know in advance which works better.
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Permalink Reply by omdesign on -
What kind of GIS analysis would you like from the #cchaiti folks? OSM is cool and all, but finding areas approprate for this might better be managed by someone who understands terrain needs and using WorldWind can include the Open Street Maps layer as well as rivers and streams.
This would enable a more comprehensive view in 3 dimensions that could help a lot when determining slope and terrain suitable for settlements as you describe.
I am surprised that a wider conversation about shelter isn't in the public domain (at least I haven't found it) many materials exists locally that can make workable shelter a reality.
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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I don't have a clue about the kind of GIS analysis that would be needed, at all!
I think permaculture experts do have some idea of what might be needed. I think Haiti is similar to that "greening the desert" video by Geoff Lawton. I'd love that conversation to happen. Permaculturalists are looking into what they call Permaculture Relief Corps.
Thing is, sometimes it looks like it's not a conversation, but a number of monologues, when - in my mind - people are not really against each other, and many alternatives are part of a wider "shelter ecosystem". Hexayurts are faster than sand-bag shelters, and bricks are more durable (earthquakes permitting). (Just my thoughts here. Can't talk for anyone else.)
To keep things focused, this particular conversation is about hexayurts as an option in Haiti.
I think the requirements for a settlement area are already well defined by "refugee camp experts": so many people, mixing or not with the previous population, fast to set up, within budget, whatever. And a complementary set of requirements would come from the permaculture domain: density, variety, edges, diversity, whatever.
"Conversation" means we'd need to bring people in.
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Permalink Reply by Lucas on
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There's another objection to the use of plywood, which applies to many other materials: if they burn well, they can be stolen. Kind of "your shelter is my fuel".
Which means we need to think systemically and look at the whole problem ... maybe with some creativity. Maybe apply some paint that makes the wood _stink_ if you burn it too soon in the recovery process?
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