Disaster Shelter | Haiti Economic Conditions
Part 5 of a 5 part series

OK, a couple of details.

The brick gauges can be two or three sizes. The largest brick pays more. If the chipper has an accident and chips too far, there is a medium size he can chip to. Then perhaps a small one that sells for less.  The gauge is simply a rectangle and a length.

The brick gauge can be in the form of a simple backpack, to help carry the load of bricks back to the collection point. I have a design in mind and it should cost no more than a decent lunch to make.

Enterprising people can set up a brick yard, where rough stone is collected and chipped in one area. This has the added advantages of shortening travel times and creating another valuable commodity as a by-product, gravel, useful for concrete.

This project can be started with a minimum of capital. Setting up distribution will take some capital, but not much. That capital should be readily available for any jobs project in Haiti. The individual cost of equipping one worker to start, should be far less than the cost of feeding that worker for a month.

Any new export is a good thing for Haiti. Any new job created in Haiti is a plus. The ability to create a new industry in Haiti at a low cost and targeted to help the poorest, is an opportunity too good to miss.

What we need now are grant writers to secure funds to get a management staff organized, technical help from people who have knowledge inside the industries we have discussed, and activists of all types to write letters to anyone with the power to help.

Let’s work together and make this happen for the people of Haiti.

Frank Schooley
Designer; Terrapeg & Shelter In A Day

READ Part 1
READ Part 2
READ Part 3
READ Part 4

READERS: What are your thoughts?

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. 

Disaster Shelter | Haiti Economic Conditions
Part 3 of a 5 part series

Solar powered cement production has been proven possible and, as a bonus, can be done not just efficiently, but without producing waste carbon dioxide, CO2, the greenhouse gas normally produced in this industrial process. The details are complicated but to quickly sum up this exciting new research, it’s possible to cheaply produce cement using solar power, in an environmentally cleaner way, producing less or no greenhouse gas by-products (CO2) and, as a bonus, the chemical reaction gives off carbon monoxide (CO) which is used as a raw material with a wide range of industrial applications.  This by-product is in theory worth more than it costs to produce the cement, making the cement production (practically) free with the assumption that the CO gas can be collected and sold.

From Nanowerk.com:

I know, it makes my head hurt too. The simple version is, solar thermal cement not only works but can work far better and cleaner than current production methods. This could change everything for Haiti... and the whole world, come to think about it.  Just think what it would mean if the cost of a bag of cement was suddenly half cost. Haiti has plenty of available labor and so many projects that need building. Dams, reservoirs, roads, bridges, houses, all would be in reach if cement was affordable.  Standards of living would rise along with jobs availability. Infrastructure projects would stimulate the economy in a thousand ways. Haitians know how to build and love to build. Inexpensive materials are the key to unlock the potential of the people of Haiti and practically free cement is now theoretically possible.

One final thought. Aid organizations and finance operations like the World Development Bank have money available for Developing World infrastructure projects that make sense financially. This project, that creates the building blocks of every subsequent infrastructure project in Haiti, should have little trouble gathering the support of those who make the planning of long-term strategy their business.

OK Frank, this is a bit long term. What about the short term problem of jobs in Haiti?

I’ve got at least one idea, in next week's Part 4.  I call it:  Haiti… One Brick At A Time.

READ Part 1.

READ Part 2.

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. 

Could Shelter In A Day's disaster shelter change the world?
Part 2 of a 6 part series

Can a building be versatile enough to be useful for disaster relief, nation building, displaced populations, military personnel housing and storage, and backyard sheds without looking like a greenhouse, steel oven box, tent or yurt?

What would a better, cheaper, faster building look like? What should it do?

Here’s a wish list for immediate housing:

• Can be made quickly as needed and economically. There’s never enough resources.
• Stacks small and tall and forklifts to save cargo space. Delivers onsite with any standard truck.
• Is fast and simple to erect, without costly resources like power, heavy equipment or even tools.
• Can be built by anyone in hours, not days or weeks or even months. No training necessary.
• Can be built with or without a foundation. One may not be available and the need won’t wait.
• Is easily expandable and easily configurable for different needs.
• Can be secured to the ground with a simple to install, screw-into the ground, tie-down system.
• Uses long lasting, sustainable materials that are termite, rust and rot resistant.
• Provides immediate, lockable security for those in need, and their precious belongings. 
• Offers real, permanent protection from the elements, not just shade.
• Comfortable in any climate with screened windows and cross ventilation.
• Is affordable not just initially, but over time. Saves most building costs.
• Can be easily modified with familiar tools to adapt to local needs.
• Can be disassembled, stored and reused when necessary. 
• Damaged parts are easy to replace as all parts of the structure are standardized.
• Provides dignified, familiar looking, but most of all, affordable housing.

Would you believe this house exists!  How was it done? What’s changed?

I have been a cabinetmaker for over 45 years. My kitchen shop has a computerized (CNC) router, a relatively new technology that cuts all my cabinets, saving time, mistakes and money. With the collapse of the building industry in 2008, I found the time to take up my longstanding dream and began designing furniture to be cut with the CNC router. I was cutting fiberboard because it was the least expensive material I could get to practice with. Slowly, I came to respect this seldom used material.

To get around fiberboards’ connecting problem, I re-invented an old-style carpenter’s joint, the mortise and through-tenon with locking peg, making it possible to cut all the parts using a CNC router. This new Tool Free joint is designed to be assembled without metal fasteners, using just a hammer, cut from the same fiberboard material.  The joint overcomes the connecting problems of the material and magnifies all its strengths. It forms a connection that has proven to be both easy to assemble and surprisingly strong, allowing the use of fiberboard for structural applications for the first time. These three leaps forward, (the ‘Green’ fiberboard material, the new joint, and precise cutting with a CNC router) working together, make Shelter In A Day a breakthrough development and an innovative, new technology.

According to World Population Balance website, our world population will add an average of 200,000 people every day. Additionally, millions, even billions of people now have unsafe, substandard housing made from found materials (that’s a nice word for junk). All these people need housing and this housing should be made from sustainable materials if we care about our future generations. Sustainable materials are used and reused and easily replaced, are natural in origin, are grown, not mined, and familiar to people

In February, my Shelter won a People’s Choice Award at the Inventors Fair in Palm Beach. This spring, Shelter In A Day took the really big prize, Most Innovative Product, from the very people who really know the Disaster Relief World, in a landslide vote by this year’s participants at the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington, D.C.

Can I really build a house, school, clinic or church…in an afternoon? 

Check back next week for Part 3.  Read Part 1.

READERS: What are your thoughts?

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. 

Could Shelter In A Day's disaster shelter change the world?
Part 1 of a 6 part series

When I see reports about the thousands of homeless in Haiti or in cities worldwide or those tornado victims in Moore Oklahoma, I think, what would it feel like to have nowhere to go this evening...or tomorrow… or next month? After the earthquake in Haiti, I couldn’t sleep… for weeks. I’d toss and turn, worrying that something, anything had to be done. But what?

Imagine yourself living in a shack made of scrap metal, old plywood or sticks and tarps, or the rags the tarps have become. Just imagine the walls of your home blowing in the wind, no lock on the flap that is your door, no privacy, no security for your family or possessions, rain leaking down on everybody and everything you have left, maybe a storm coming. Now imagine how it feels to know nothing is likely to get better for the foreseeable future…

I know, I said I’d lift your spirits so… It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Food, Water, Shelter… Basic Human Needs

According to a Pew Research poll, after the earthquake, nearly half of Americans either gave or planned to give money for Haiti relief, at least 1.4 Billion…where did it go? It’s hard to say, and there’s the problem. This spring, I went to the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington D.C. and talked with insiders who know something about where donations go. Although a good deal went to food, water and temporary shelter, the overall picture for permanent relief and rebuilding is not good. They tell me that somehow even the best of intentions get mired in unavoidable costs.

What if I told you it’s now possible to affordably end homelessness?  Hard to believe?  To answer this we need to take it step by step to be clear… and I will reveal how, so Stay With Me. After all, it’s not every day you get to change the world.

Building anything, homes, schools, clinics, takes time and time is the enemy. Traditional building techniques use expensive materials, individually sourced and in greatest demand whenever the need is critical. Building also requires plenty of skilled labor, heavy equipment, tools, power and time…lots and lots of time. You and I know it’s frustrating to build anything…but we’ve gotten used to it because we don’t have any choices. We all know that time is money but we’re stuck in a rut. It’s aggravating, right?

Imagine you are trying to build just one simple house in the middle of nowhere but you need it now, or hundreds of houses for flood victims in say, Japan, or thousands perhaps in Moore, Oklahoma, or hundreds of thousands in Haiti because the need is so great. Now multiply that number by the total time to build anything including the foundation, tools, materials, the labor, and all the time related overhead like meals, lodging, transport, the list goes on and on and ... Wow.

It’s no wonder we, as a caring society, are overwhelmed. It’s no wonder government aid and disaster relief organizations and NGO’s with the best of intentions, can’t seem to make much headway.

Can we build Better, Cheaper, Faster? The old saying goes; choose any two. How do we get all three?

Check back next week for Part 2.

READER: What are your thoughts?

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. 

About
Frank Schooley, Designer | Disaster Shelter

On the day of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, furniture designer Frank Schooley was saddened and moved by the destruction he saw replayed on the news.  It’s been estimated that 3 million people were affected by Haiti’s earthquake with approximately 316,000 souls perishing and 1 million Haitians left homeless. Haiti’s government also estimated 250,000 personal residences and 30,000 commercial buildings were either severely damaged or just collapsed altogether. Over three years later, sadly not much has changed. A traveler to Haiti today will find that the same disastrous construction is being rebuilt in the same dangerous way.

Being an industrious furniture maker, Frank knew he could help. Using the same techniques and materials he originally developed for his eco-friendly furniture line Terrapeg, he immediately starting drafting plans for a disaster relief shelter he calls Shelter In Day.

Learn more about Frank Schoolye's innovative disaster shelter or contact us today.

About Shelter In A Day | Disaster Shelters
Winner of 2013 Aid and International Development Forum (AIDF) "Most Innovative Product Award." Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. Shelter's disaster recovery housing provides safe and secure, simple to construct, green homes for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The disaster shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. 

Shelter in a Day is made from fiberboard, but not just any fiberboard. We found an exterior grade fiberboard that is waterproof and has a borate treatment throughout that makes it termite and rot resistant. This borate treatment also makes the material more difficult to burn. Fiberboard is a man-made, recycled wood product that has fibers running in every direction which makes it strong in every direction. This absence of a single direction wood grain allows new designs and stronger joints. Wood fiber is the earths’ most basic renewable resource and fiberboard is made from pre-consumer, recycled wood chips, the waste product of lumber production. These chips are heated to break it down into individual fibers which are then pressed mixed with an acrylic binder, and baked strong sheets of various thicknesses.

I never really understood how strong fiberboard was until we ran some basic tests to try to get an idea of the strength of our new Shelter. We use a new, easy to assemble mortise and tenon joint with a locking peg to build our Shelter. We took a single tenon loop (the ‘tab’ of our Tool Free Joint) and hung it in a steel fixture so that weight could be hung from it for testing. This loop has a thickness of one inch and the amount of material around the loop was one inch, resulting in a load bearing cross section of one square inch of fiberboard. Then we added weight to the loop using six of my largest friends sitting on a wood beam and at maximum capacity of the beam, we had over 1,300 pounds of live weight on one square inch of fiberboard, without distortion or failure. It is important to keep in mind that this loading represents the worst case scenario for loading of the joint, a straight pull. In practice, the joints of the Shelter will never have loads applied in a straight line, they will load at various angles where the joint is much, much stronger. There are a 350 or so of these joints in a Shelter. The tool Free Joint and the fiberboard materials are a new technology for building construction.

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.

Our test model disaster relief house (recent picture above) has withstood Florida's elements the last 20 months beautifully. 

Mango for everybody...$20 US Mango smeared smiles..Priceless!

An Orphanage for Haiti

The Good Samaritan Orphanage is located in Grand Groave Haiti, about 45 minutes drive west of Port au Prince. The orphanage is home to about 70 kids and young adults, about 10 adult teachers, administrators, cooks and
helper/drivers, all under the direction of the Reverend Enock Deroseney, a saintly man if I ever met one. He also runs a school for most of the surrounding children with about 200 students, five days a week. The school,
dormitories, kitchen and church all fell down during the earthquake , the  epicenter was just a mile or two away, but fortunately, no lives were lost.

Since then, they have struggled to house and feed everyone. Housing consists of  wood frame cabins with blue tarp walls and tin roofs. Most have dirt floors. The tarps and other materials were donated when relief efforts flooded in but those tarps are in tatters now and replacements are scarce. Showers and laundry are all outdoors but the water is clean, coming down the mountain from a spring. Several outhouses are spaced around the camp but usage is light with only a single daily meal of rice and beans, eaten under the trees or wherever a seat can be found in camp.

Good Samaritan feeds a noon meal to the students and an evening meal to the orphans, their only meal of the day. When I visited in May, 2012, the kitchen consisted of a wood frame shack with a mud floor, mud up to the ankles of the cooks, and no running water. This kitchen was a new and welcome improvement over the previous kitchen, a charcoal brazier set up under a large mango tree. That 'kitchen' served 300 meals a day for over two years.

The site is beautiful, about a mile from the sea and about 1,000 feet up with an incredible view, but the road is long, rocky and very steep, far from the main highway and a real car killer. The orphanage owns about an acre of land but most of the camp is outside of that and the site too steep for expansion and will never have a power line in the foreseeable future.

Enock owns a larger site in Petit Groave, about 10 miles away, right on the main  highway. This site is beautiful with banana groves and mango trees and a grand church building that survived the earthquake in fine condition. Built off the side of  the church are three big classrooms and on the other side is most of a house, under construction.  The site has good water, a perfect place for a septic field, and a central courtyard just perfect for that never-ending soccer game. Electric power is on its way down the highway, less than 1/2 mile away.

We want to move the orphanage to this new site. I took basic measurements and have come up with a site plan including 10-12 cabins and a mess hall big enough so everyone can eat together. The plan also includes bathroom/shower buildings spaced between and a short distance from every cabin, and kitchen building and a bakery building so the orphanage can realize their dream to set up a for-profit baking business using machines they already have.

All the buildings are designed, secure Shelter in a Day units, 12 x16 feet, with Terrapeg furnishings and will feature concrete floors and steel roofs. The cabins will sleep six on two stacks of three bunk beds. There will be a table
with six chairs designed for the children with book/papers storage under the seats and wall lockers for clothes and personal items.

The mess hall will have tables for six and the same chairs so the space can double as classrooms.  Shower buildings will have flush toilets with a septic field on the low end of the property.

Because the Shelters are easy to build, this entire project can be built in a month and will cost about $200k a figure that is close to the average price of one US home in 1999. The plans are ready, the site is ready, the kids are ready…all we need is the money to make this happen.

Frank Schooley

Terrapeg / Shelter In A Day

Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day. Shelter In A Day is the brainchild of eco-friendly, furniture designer Frank Schooley. These emergency disaster relief shelters provide safe and secure, simple to construct, green housing for those displaced by natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes or floods. 

The Shelters are a solidly constructed, termite, rust and rot resistant house, with lockable doors and windows.  Homes are crafted from waterproof, recycled wood fiber material and can be easily erected anywhere, in one day.

Our test model disaster relief house (recent picture above) has withstood Florida's elements the last 20 months beautifully.