John Hibbs wrote: > At 10:42 AM -0500 9/15/05, Taran Rampersad wrote: > > Thank, Taran, for the reminder about the Jamaican effort. I had looked > at that about four years ago...I see they have made a LOT of progress. > > All of what you say - every single word - has merit. Now, how to get > our hands on some of the $50 billion being appropriated as a result of > Katrina to put some of the Rampersad Boxes into - well, boxes? > Shouldn't every Red Cross center of any size have a couple on hand? > (I'd love to see the Jamaicans be the builders, but that really is far > fetched..)
If you want a 3.5 foot tall by 2 foot wide by 1 foot deep box, you need ((3.5'*4)+(2'*4)+(1'*4))= 26 feet of PVC, 4 joints (3 side), and some PVC glue - and a hacksaw and a ruler with a pencil. I'd suggest 2 inch PVC, though you could use 1.5 inch PVC if you had to. Then you can use plastic sheeting (plexi) for the external, which you would need an easily calculated few square feet of. Then you can drill and mount the pieces with screws, and fill the interior with foam. I'd advise against standard packaging foam, because that causes an electrostatic discharge which can ruin electronics. Zap. Pow. You have a box. Or, you could just use the PVC frame with sheeting on top, and store the PCs and monitors elsewhere, but the box makes things rather easy. Like legos. I like legos. > > Can we pursue this to where an offer is put on the Feds table by a > reputable provider? Every Red Cross office could build their own boxes. It's easy. It's the electronics and the container would be the real issue. What would probably be better is to build a demo and release the plans as Open Content. If you have all the materials on hand - the basic boxes, electronics, and solar stuff as well as the container - an untrained crew could put something like this together within 3 days. A trained crew could put it together in one. So I don't know that the Federal Government should get involved. Why insert bureaucracy? The beauty of this idea is that with this, a few containers could even be on standby for shipping to disaster regions. Do monthly checks on equipment, like ambulances are supposed to have done with each shift, and a roster of people who rotate (blue crew, gold crew) every month to man the containers. A 3 person crew, trained, could handle 2 containers of 12 machines, though you should double up for blue crew/gold crew rotation at the disaster site. And don't forget, the more people you put in a disaster area, the more supplies they will need not just for themselves, but for emergencies. Ideally, the people crewing this would be EMT trained (not necessarily certified), because sick people will be around... and also, bad news comes on the internet and phone. So placement of these during a disaster should also be near the Aid stations, or integrated into the Aid/Security stations, and a clear path would have to be maintained from the Teletainer to the Aid station. We're dealing with people here. People on the teams should also have a working knowledge of the equipment, and have top of the line communications skills for training new people (you're going to grab volunteers on the ground who speak the local language, as necessary) and so on and so forth. But now I'm delving into the logistics, and I have some stuff I have to finish today. I should probably write this all up and release it as open content ASAP. -- Taran Rampersad Presently in: Georgetown, Guyana [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Taran "Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
