Tuesday, October 25, 2005

About the picture below:
World Shelters is a nonprofit group that specializes in providing these temporary units to people affected by war and disaster all over the world. They brought about 60 of these down to South Mississippi and gave them for free to be used as family living units, supply hangars and emergency clinics.
Not only are they doing good work, the tent design is very smart and very durable. Those PVC skeletons are designed to create the tubular structure when standard FEMA, USAID and UN tarps are connected to them. They have about eight and a half feet of height clearance at the center and are 11 feet wide. They are meant to last for two years in wind, rain and snow.
What's more, World Shelters received praise from USAID and the Buckminster Fuller Institute, an organization that advocates for smart design concepts.

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary. The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”
-R. Buckminster Fuller

2 Comments:

Blogger One of The Wildwomen said...

Good things happen to those that do good things. I expect to see you two guys have great things happen to you!!! I don't know what your journalistic lives were like before Katrina, but you have shown what you're made of right here!! I hope you will keep us posted on what is happening with the two of you,it will be interesting to watch! You'll always have a fan here for what you did for me!

7:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amen to that

1:41 AM  

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