Better Disaster Shelters than FEMA Trailers (Video)

An aerospace engineer and Mississippi native named Michael McDaniel "watched helplessly as Hurricane Katrina forced thousands of people out of their homes and into crowded, poorly equipped 'shelters.'" This scenario led to Michael founding Reaction Housing and the creation of its first product, the Exo (as in exoskeleton) shelter. This company isn't holding its hand out for crowdfunding. It got $1.5 million in seed capital in March, 2014, later got another $10 million, and is now going into mass production of its Exo housing units.

Reaction Housing is not the only attempt to make post-disaster housing better, or at least less expensive, than the infamous FEMA trailers. A charity called ShelterBox in Lakewood Ranch, FL, fills boxes with everything a family or group of up to 10 people needs, including a heavy-duty tent, bedding, and kitchen supplies, in order to survive after a natural disaster. (Here's an interview video I shot in 2010 about ShelterBox.) Exo, ShelterBox or any one of dozens of other emergency housing alternatives are good to have around, ready to go, for the next Katrina, Sandy or Tsunami. High tech? Not necessarily, but technology has obviously made emergency housing faster and easier to erect than the "earthquake shacks" that were built in San Francisco to house people made homeless by the 1906 earthquake.

Comments

Yet another makes the same mistake.

[duck_rifted]

They are cutting themselves out of market reach by excluding consumers. Their success or failure depends entirely upon whether organizations, wealthy individuals, or municipalities will order large lots. People with deep pockets don't spend on impulse, and they're just as likely to create their own solution as invest in this one.

Meanwhile, personal responsibility in preparation for potential future emergencies is countermanded. An alternative to homeless camps is prevented. Applications beyond emergency housing are completely nullified. And the company cuts itself out of profits. This seems to be what always happens with emergency shelter. Either it's priced such that one could buy something in the range from an old mobile home to small house, or it's simply not available.

What is the difference between selling a 25-40 unit lot and taking 25-40 consumer orders before beginning production? This company could give itself six months per order for enough orders to be reached to justify production and then give the consumer an option for a refund. It wouldn't even be necessary if they priced it reasonably such that better solutions aren't also more cost-effective.

The engineer saw Katrina victims and wanted to solve the problem. Bullshit. The Katrina victims wouldn't have had access to this, by design.

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[Anonymous Coward]

What problem does this solve for Katrina Victims? Why would I want to live in this when I could live in a fema trailer instead?

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[CreatureComfort]

Bingo!

All this does is provide emergency shade/shelter from rain. It completely fails to provide: 1) potable water containment, 2) grey/black water containment, 3) cooking facilities, 4) sanitary facilities, 5) perishable goods storage, 6) personal goods storage, 7) any form of even temporary privacy, 8) any form of air conditioning or even ventilation, 9) any form of power for receiving news , maintaining contact, or even doing useful work outside daylight hours.

This would scale less well than tents, for equivalent protection/amenities, and in no way be a long term housing solution for families waiting for an area to rebuild, as many of the FEMA trailers turned into.

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[amiga3D]

I like the shelter but the price point kills it. That's way too much money for a fiberglass shelll with fold out bunks. If it were about 2 or 3 grand I could see it selling as a hunting or fishing cabin like crazy. Especially with some sort of solar power option. 6 grand is outrageous although it's not as big a rip-off as the damn FEMA trailers.

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[TWX]

FEMA trailers often lack off-grid utilites too, they need to be connected to a sanitary sewer and need to get their fresh water from water mains, but that said, they offer advantages in being portable without special equipment (ie, can be towed by a pickup truck or large car with a simple trailer hitch and draw bar) and there's a secondary market for them after their primary emergency use is done, often to the very people that used them during the emergency. FEMA trailers are either returned to FEMA and auctioned, or those who used them are given the option to purchase them for an almost ridiculously low price compared to the cost of a new or lightly used travel trailer.

I hope to never need to use FEMA-provided emergency or long-term shelter, as that means that I've suffered through a disaster of some sort and cannot live in my home, but having a travel trailer that would function basically as a shoddy studio apartment that can be moved by me if it's inadvertently placed somewhere unsafe or unsuitable beats out living in a small hostel or barracks without any other facilities.

I do get it though, that some areas are not well suited to the FEMA trailer, especially higher-density cities. I don't think that the presented solutions would work well in those areas either though, as they're still one-storey and there wouldn't be enough empty real-estate to place that many people. It would make more sense to design some kind of shipping container-based solution with some kind of central forced-air heating and cooling, with the ability to stack units two or three stories high before a specially-built gangway is bolted to one side, like those older-style motels or even *gasp* like prisons. Don't pack 'em in so tight that they're horrible, group nine, twelve, or fifteen units together in three stories and leave gaps between groupings. If a disaster struck New York City, it would be possible to deploy this kind of temporary infrastructure in Central Park or in other open spaces to house people until more permanent accommodations can be made.

In short, make it so the occupant can be self-sufficient (ie, FEMA trailer) or use infrastructure that makes deployment and management of the units practical (ie, stackable modules like shipping containers).

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[TWX]

You're tied to one place though, as they don't appear to be designed to be moved by the occupant. Contrast that to someone's car, which also acts as a shelter if the body and glass are intact, and has the advantage of being capable of being moved under its own power.

Hell, the best shelter-in-place unit is probably the minivan. Small enough that it can be parked just about anywhere that the terrain isn't too rough, generally decent fuel economy so moving it around doesn't take much precious gasoline if availability is poor, and with a smaller engine if it has to idle to provide temporary power, the engine is not consuming as much fuel as a larger van with larger engine either. Plus many minivans were designed to be slept-in on roadtrips with fold-flat bench seats or seats that stow completely into the floor.

Even non-running, a minivan can still be flat-towed by another vehicle or towed by a common vehicle in the form of a tow-truck.

Re:Yet another makes the same mistake.

[stephanruby]

They are cutting themselves out of market reach by excluding consumers.

This portapotty-like shelter seems to have been optimized for government use. As far I can tell, it will tip over in extreme winds and it will suffocate its occupants in extreme heat. The last thing they want is the extremely bad reviews that might come from actual consumer adoption/experimentation before the government/Halliburton money comes in.

Cost

[wired_parrot]

How much do these cost compared to FEMA trailers? As maligned as the FEMA trailers are, I suspect the reason they are widely used in disasters is because they are cheap and can therefore be deployed in large quantities. Sure you could do something of higher quality, but if it raises their unit cost it will significantly affect the ability to widely deploy enough shelter in an affected area. Having a low cost solution that can be deployed in large numbers may be more important than quality in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

Re:Cost

[SethJohnson]

The exo shelters massively dominate over FEMA trailers on the criteria you have proposed here.

These nest inside each other, so you can lay about ten or so on a flatbed trailer. I think you could get two FEMA trailers on top of a flatbed trailer.

Cost? Well, a FEMA trailer needs to be constructed to highway transportation standards. Do you think that's cheaper than building something to "more durable than a tent" standard (exo shelter)?

Re:Cost

[ArcadeMan]

Sixteen units per trailer, at around 34 seconds into the video.

Re:Cost

[Xylantiel]

The summary is a bit ambiguous. The first part says these are supposed to substitute for shelters (which I think are like schools and football stadiums), while the second talks about FEMA trailers. Temporary shelters and temporary housing are fairly different things, and FEMA trailers are the latter and not the former. Perhaps this is intended to fill the gap between the two? Given the features other posters have pointed out, these do not appear to be temporary housing, more like temporary shelter.

Re:Cost

[chihowa]

It's a $6000-12000 tent that sleeps four and needs to be towed by a truck. For that cost, you could fill a similar sized trailer up with (non-rigid) tents and sleep hundreds of people.

What am I missing

[Jawbox]

Am I missing something? This looks like a high-tech tent with no cooking, cleaning, or living space.

Re:What am I missing

[NotDrWho]

Yeah, but the door locks will interface directly with your smart watch!

hexayurt

[lkcl]

http://hexayurt.com/

it's a free (libre) design, i'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the original post. the modular design (it's hexagons) allows for yes, things like solar-panel hexagons, WIFI-pre-installed hexagons, lighting-pre-installed hexagons and so on.

I lived in a FEMA trailer and it wasn't that bad

[n1ywb]

I had the priviledge of living in a government surplus FEMA trailer on a Navy base for about four weeks. It really wasn't that bad. They're just cheap trailers built by some cheap trailer company like the millions of other cheap trailers that people live in all over the US. There's nothing FEMA-ey about them. I don't know what everybody is complaining about. Bunch of whine-ass cry-babies. "Oh the FREE trailer I got from the government ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH". Or maybe this whole thing was concocted by the media. When FEMA got rid of them, this base got about a dozen, for free, and they've been lived in ever since, including by me, and they are perfectly livable.

The content-free web site.

[westlake]

I open the Exo web page. I see all the pretty pictures.

What I don't see is what I need to know about heating, cooling and ventilation.

The lack of storage for personal belongings, food and water, the space and facilities needed for cooking and sanitation. Not the slightest thought has been given to the comfort, pride or privacy of the refugee.

That idiotic door lock bothers me no end.

These geeks may know tech, but they are utterly blind to the psychological and social forces in play when people are under extreme stress.

These stackable plastic cups seem more appropriately designed for Joe Arpaio's Tent City prison camps.

$6K-$12K?

[Dereck1701]

$6,000 to $12,000 for a rigid one room 4 bed tent with no facilities? Are they insane, you can get a full fledged multi room camper with a bathroom, kitchen, running water and just as many beds for $15,000. There is definitely a use for this kind of emergency shelter but not at that price point. Heck you can buy some of those multi-room camping tents for $300 each. A quick redesign to make it easier to set up and the addition of some kind of living module (bathroom, shower, kitchen) and you could have something far better than this and probably wouldn't cost more than $2,000