Hi Abby, good to meet you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfIe8xcR1M is a short film we made at a winter hexayurt village in Brussels. It was for an art project, and very successful.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/advice-for-occupy-avoid-winter-war-2881 is a piece I wrote which provides more context on winter operations, and why one might wish *not* Occupy through the winter in cold places. It's based on a lot of years spending a lot of time outdoors,and my time with freight train riders and a grim sense of the importance of comfort to human psychology. It appears to be the Ur-text from which the latest Adbusters Tactical Briefing was prepared, for what that is worth: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/adbusters-tactical-briefing-18.html so it's good to know people are listening. Umoja Village is also instructive: a squatted village in Florida that was burned to the ground the night before the first hexayurts were to go up. That was, hm, 2008 or so. Suspicious at the time. So that's my first advice: Don't occupy through the winter, it's going to suck. If you are going to do it, there's two basic approaches. 1> Do the legwork, spend the money. A> Get Thermax HD (which is a heavier grade of the Tuff R hexayurt boards). It's fire rated because the aluminium surface is about as thick as a coke can, so flame just can't penetrate. B> Get softiles for the flooring. We're talking about $1000 per H12 hexayurt in those materials. They'll last forever, though! 2> Hack it. A> Smoke detector in every yurt. B> Massively strict no-candles, no-cookstoves, no-fire policy that you take really, really seriously. It's not just the hexayurt burning, it's the stuff inside the hexayurt - cushions, blankets, couches. Cheap, warm stuff tends to be flammable as hell. C> Fire extinguishers. They're cheap and they really work. One per hexayurt, standard issue. D> No smoking inside. Ever. On pain of being kicked out of the camp. Enforced, not joked about. E> Manage the heating without flame. How, I don't know. F> Treat the boards. There are fireproof paints. You could coat the boards with wallpaper paste and thick, thick baking foil. You could look at a fabric coating (for warmth) and load it with borax. You could ask some engineers who do fire management work in real buildings what to do, and you could obey them to the letter.* * yes, I mean ask a professional. I'm trained as an engineer: a software engineer. I've got zero qualifications to tell you about how to manage fire risk, and if you don't ask people who are properly trained to manage these risks in buildings and communities, you're running the risk of one of us screwing up so badly somebody gets killed. Use the web, find some suitable engineering firm, anybody who deals with big buildings, and ask them to help in support of Occupy. Somebody will say yes. Umoja Village is instructive. I'm not saying it was arson, but I'm saying that the timing was very, very suspicious. You have to take that away as a way of getting rid of your camp. This is harsh, but Occupy is beginning to scare people, and the US has a long history of foul violence towards movements of political change. My primary concern is with saving lives, and I don't want to see a bunch of people getting hurt because of some off-duty cop with a gallon of kerosene and a gutfull of whiskey. Just be careful out there, ok? On flooring: palettes, then a layer of the foam boards like the walls, then a layer of 3mm hardboard (the cheap brown stuff) to spread the load of people walking on it, otherwise they'll punch right through the insulation, then a layer of carpet. Best guess, no guarantees, but it's the sort of thing that works. Good luck! Vinay PS: not four inch tape, six inch tape. Your website says 4", and it makes construction much, much harder. On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Abby <[email protected]> wrote: > Occupy pittsburgh is tossing around the idea of a hexayurt village. I > will update more links after we make a video and have the final > proposal. > > Heres a start on what we are up to. > > http://www.occupypittsburgh.org/content/hexayurts-we-need-these-winter > > If you have any advice on flooring and Is it fire proof or how can we > make it fire proof. Please share or share whatever you would like > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "hexayurt" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt?hl=en. > > -- Vinay Gupta Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest http://bit.ly/gupta_arc <http://bit.ly/gupta_arc%20>- the Gupta State Failure Management Archive http://bit.ly/gupta_ark - or see it directly on Archive.org http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer" - Albert Camus Twitter/Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk/AIM: hexayurt UK Cell : +44 (0) 7500 895568 / USA VOIP (+1) 775-743-1851 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hexayurt" group. 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