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World Shelters provides ‘a home for everyone’

By MELODY STONE, The Eureka Reporter

Published: Jul 12 2008, 12:23 AM · Updated: Jul 12 2008, 12:35 AM

When natural disasters strike, some people lose their homes. World Shelters wanted to find a solution to this.

The nonprofit organization based in Arcata designed a dome house that can be easily transported and built.

It’s called a U-Dome, and it’s made out of flame-retardant, corrugated, UV-resistant polypropylene. When the pieces are laid flat, 27,000 square feet of shelter can fit in a standard ocean-freight container.

The team that started World Shelters has been working on disaster relief for 30 years. World Shelters became incorporated as a nonprofit group four years ago.

World Shelters started making tents that were easy to assemble and transport, but after Hurricane Katrina, it decided to start working on a hard-panel structure.

It’s been working on the U-Dome for about two years, and is in the process of getting U-Domes to the areas in China most affected by the recent earthquake.

World Shelters Executive Director Bruce LeBel said, “Five million people are homeless in China”; World Shelters has a proposal for 10,000 shelters.

“With the tooling we’ve produced, we have the ability to produce an unlimited quantity.”

It has a manufacturing partner in Southern California and is putting together a partnership with a manufacturer in China.

World Shelters isn’t just looking at disasters, LeBel said. “Domestically, we are focusing on homeless issues.”

Its vision is “shelter with dignity and hot showers.” World Shelters can provide shelter (two people to a dome) and showers for $1.50 per person per day.

“We’re in dialogue with lead agencies in (several) municipalities,” said LeBel.

The U-Dome is also available for private purchase. A dome with a locking RV door, six vents and two windows costs $1,945. More information is available online at Worldshelters.org. World Shelters has started selling the shelters on eBay, with the profit margins used to support its mission.

Dottie Russell, of Southern Humboldt, bought two U-Domes from World Shelters.

She set one up in Southern Humboldt and has been serving one or two people. Russell said the U-Dome provides transitional housing for sleeping and reflecting.

Russell and her husband have been living in the second U-Dome and modifying it to be more like a home.

“They are nice and fresh and clean, they don’t smell, and they don’t have mold. A lot of the houses in Humboldt County have mold, so this is one step above that,” said Russell. She also enjoys the sunshine that comes in. “It’s really quite beautiful.”

The U-Dome will be featured in Triennale di Milano, an architecture and design museum in Milan, Italy. The exhibit is called “Una Casa per Tutti,” or “A House for All.”

“Last year we had a lot of people die (in Southern Humboldt) from not having housing. There’s no excuse for people to die when shelter can be provided for them,” said Russell. “Isn’t a human life worth more than a couple thousand dollars?”

Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

by Rachael King

Jesse Robbins had to get across U.S. Route 90 quickly. Hurricane Katrina had wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, and Robbins, who is an emergency medical technician, was on a mission for World Shelters, which provides temporary, secure shelters for emergency supplies. Robbins had been guided across the highway by American Red Cross workers using Google (GOOG) mapping tools in areas where street signs were washed away.

But Robbins quickly hit a dead end. The passage had been washed away by the storm; his route was based on dated images, rather than a live satellite feed. “Frequently, you’d be working with them and they’d give you directions over closed streets or places that didn’t exist any longer,” says Robbins, who also is co-chairman of O’Reilly Media’s Velocity conference on Web performance and operations.

Such are the pitfalls regularly encountered by emergency responders when disasters strike. They also explain what drives the companies hard at work developing mapping tools designed to help people find their way around in the aftermath of floods, earthquakes, and other cataclysms.

Collaborative Mapping

GeoCommons.com, for example, runs a Web site where users can explore a huge atlas of maps with various data and add their own information. “The advent of user-contributed data allows nontechnical people to publish their own maps,” says Sean Gorman, CEO and founder of FortiusOne, which runs GeoCommons. In the wake of devastating flooding in the Midwest in May, people created their own maps of everything from bridge closures to outlines of flood zones to Home Depot (HD) locations where people could get supplies. The maps in turn were made available to anyone.

OpenStreetMap is a freely available map that lets anyone with knowledge of a place contribute to the map from anywhere. Mikel Maron saw the potential for using collaborative mapping in the event of disasters and has taken the idea to the group in the U.N. Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) responsible for making maps for first responders in a disaster. The U.N. is starting to test the idea, according to Maron, co-founder of Mapufacture, a Web service that lets people build their own maps and data sets.

Art vs. Practice

Other mapping tools place limits on who can make updates. “We may not want to rely on the crowd for data in an emergency, so there are tweaks to the model possible,” Maron said during a presentation about disaster tech at a conference in Burlingame, Calif., in May. “A smaller crowd of people who have some measure of responsibility in a situation should be able to pass along information.” After Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, the UNJLC used maps that collected information about the extent of flooding and the state of critical transportation and health infrastructure. The center asked the community to e-mail information about the state of roads, bridges, ports, and waterways, and then used that information to update the map, Maron explained.

His work in Louisiana after Katrina showed Robbins firsthand that some tools don’t work nearly as well on the ground as they do in a lab. “One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art [vs.] the state of the practice,” he says. He’s hoping that with each disaster, he sees less of a difference between the two.

The “Una Casa per Tutti” exhibit will continue until September 14^th. The curators’ intention of the exhibition is to present exemplary architectural and design ideas from the past along with those from contemporary, inventive organizations and designers. The invitation by the international architecture and design foundation Triennale di Milano recognizes World Shelters’ innovative design with a humanitarian focus.

“World Shelters’ U-Dome is simple, economical, and compact, but can do many things. From the European perspective, it is important that many domes can be gathered to make a community like a village,” said Fulvio Irace, the Scientific Curator for Architecture at the Trienalle. Within the “Casa Per Tutti” exhibit, the U-Dome is the only shelter shown in full scale that is currently in production and able to be manufactured and distributed in large quantities for effective disaster relief and other humanitarian shelter applications.

“We are thrilled to be chosen as one of the worlds most innovatively disaster relief structures,” said World Shelters Executive Director, Bruce LeBel. “We will continue to produce functioning, affordable and masterfully designed structures to aid people who find themselves without shelter.”

The following link presents a brief slide show of the U-Dome at Triennale:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ExecAsstWS/20080604Triennale02/photo?authkey=I5PpXMJTjA8#s5210305023118540754

Any seller can donate to World Shelters while listing an item on eBay. Sell anything from collectibles to cars and donate a portion through eBay Giving Works. Learn how.

We are looking forward to working again in the home city of the United Nations.