CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION[edit | edit source]
Problem Statement[edit | edit source]
- Many events (disasters, wars, work projects) create a need to provide large transient populations with support infrastructures (food, water, shelter, power, cooking, lighting, heating, sewage, etc.)
- Current solutions used such as canvas tents and open cooking fires have many limitations, such as cost, lowdurability, low global inventory, and high environmental impact (deforestation and pollution from wood fires).
- Many innovative solutions exist, but limited "how to" information is widely available.
- What information is available does not take into account the interdependencies of these infrastructures (e.g. uninsulated shelters require more fuel to heat, poor sewage solutions contaminate water sources, etc.)
- -Woody1 03:25, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Purpose of this Document[edit | edit source]
Origins of this Document[edit | edit source]
This document is currently being prepared and maintained by the STAR-TIDES project documentation team (an all-volunteer interdisciplinary group.)
Disclaimer[edit | edit source]
This disclaimer is important as the US Government and specifically the Department of Defense and the US Marine Corps are not tasking or directing any actions for the Expedient Infrastructure for Transient Populations (TIDES) Task Force (TF). The TIDES TF represents a convergence of many open source efforts to help refugees and disaster victims. This group is a voluntary collaboration of many individuals and organizations and is open to all. No warranties or endorsements are expressed or implied for the information contained in these slides or the various web sites that are used by the TIDESTF.
- -Woody1 03:23, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Safety[edit | edit source]
"Potential users of this information ...should exercise due care and diligence, especially in areas such as safety, health, building codes, and environmental laws and regulations."
- -Woody1 03:18, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Intellectual Property[edit | edit source]
- All information produced by the TIDES Task Force is intended to be in the public domain. All intellectual property right claims should be clearly identified by contributors prior to submission.
- The TIDES Task Force is an open-source collaborative effort and not a program of the US Government or specifically the United States Marine Corps.
- Participation of the employees of the US Government in the TIDES Task Force is intended to help the US Government in its use of this public domain information and does not represent the official endorsement of specific positions, products, techniques, policies or opinions generated through this open-source, public domain effort.
- -Woody1 03:13, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Local Laws and Ordinances[edit | edit source]
"Potential users of this information are encouraged to review applicable laws and regulations prior to application or use and should exercise due care and diligence, especially in areas such as safety, health, building codes, and environmental laws and regulations."
- -Woody1 03:15, 17 April 2007 (EDT)
Use of specific equipment and materials[edit | edit source]
Continual Process Improvement of TIDES Solution Sets and This Field Manual[edit | edit source]
TIDES Task Force[edit | edit source]
Recommendations and New Solution Sets[edit | edit source]
Characteristics and Special Considerations for Transient Populations[edit | edit source]
Refugees[edit | edit source]
Disaster Victims[edit | edit source]
First Responders[edit | edit source]
Detainees[edit | edit source]
Work Crews[edit | edit source]
Military Personal[edit | edit source]
Short-term Public Events[edit | edit source]
CHAPTER II: FUNDAMENTALS FOR PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTING TIDES[edit | edit source]
General[edit | edit source]
The Strategic and Operational Context[edit | edit source]
Concept for Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support[edit | edit source]
It is possible to provide infrastructure services like electrical power for light, or sanitary toilets, at almost every level of economic activity from poor refugees up to first world grid services. TIDES is a project dedicated to identifying how to provide infrastructure in particularly challenging environments, at a cost which can be deployed widely.
The path towards TIDES starts with the work of Buckminster Fuller on reducing the cost and resource consumption of essential services to make them available globally at a price all could afford.
More recently, the Sustainable Settlements Charrette at the Rocky Mountain Institute framed the concept of a new generation of refugee camps which would use concepts from whole systems thinking and ecological design to create a higher level of wellbeing for inhabitants.
Jim Craft's Digital Solar Village project develops another set of concepts around fine grained infrastructure to provide ICT and other services at a village level.
Finally, the Hexayurt Project provided a worked example of what could be done using cheap materials and COTS products to create an incredibly functional shelter system with a utilitarian infrastructure package.
The next step in this long developmental agenda is developing a model which allows us to quickly and accurately size up the needs of a population and locate the tools and best practices which will meet their needs quickly and efficiently, and in line with all other appropriate guidelines.
The working model we are currently using is Craft's Pyramid of Need Fulfillment.
Craft's pyramid takes Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and, essentially, treats it as a roadmap and a shopping list for solutions. If people need water, we find water systems. If they need shelter, we find shelter systems. If they need educational materials, likewise.
One critical focus of the pyramid is the concept of left-to-right movement - that we can start with very simple, cheap, portable but rough and partial solutions, and move over time towards more complete fulfillment of each class of needs. Perhaps we start with wind up flashlights, then migrate to solar panels and wireless infrastructure, and finally build a microhydro or wind system, for example.
- -Vinay Gupta 03:36, 18 April 2007 (EDT)
Camp Planning Overview[edit | edit source]
Maintenance or Establishment of Social Structures[edit | edit source]
Inter-Organizational Coordination and Authorities[edit | edit source]
Investments and Donations[edit | edit source]
Other Factors[edit | edit source]
Range of Options[edit | edit source]
CHAPTER III: OPERATIONAL TASKS AND CONSIDERATIONS[edit | edit source]
Operational Level Joint Tasks[edit | edit source]
Command, Control, Communications and Computers[edit | edit source]
Site Selection[edit | edit source]
Camp Planning and Construction[edit | edit source]
Movement and Orientation of Staff and Transient Populations[edit | edit source]
Camp Operations[edit | edit source]
Logistic Support[edit | edit source]
Force and Refugee Population Protection[edit | edit source]
Health Management of Transient Populations[edit | edit source]
Infrastructure Services as Preventative Medicine[edit | edit source]
ROUGH NOTES
- potable water stops water borne diseases.
- sewage systems that work prevent epidemics.
- smokeless cooking facilities prevent many lung and eye problems.
In terms of dollars per life saved, these are some of the most effective early stage interventions. They won't stop problems when they start, but they can help prevent issues.
Infectious disease[edit | edit source]
Malnutrition[edit | edit source]
- Plumpynut
- Micronutrient deficiency studies
- Local food production systems as a long term goal (Farm In A Box) and transfer of agricultural knowledge to local populations.
Special Needs Populations (old, young, invalids, pregnant or lactating women)[edit | edit source]
Mortuary Affairs[edit | edit source]
Consequence Management[edit | edit source]
Cultural Considerations[edit | edit source]
Public Affairs Operations[edit | edit source]
Information Operations[edit | edit source]
Civil-Military Operations[edit | edit source]
Legal[edit | edit source]
Camp Dissolution[edit | edit source]
CHAPTER IV: NONCOMBATANTS[edit | edit source]
General[edit | edit source]
Populace and Resources Control[edit | edit source]
Health and Logistic Support[edit | edit source]
Security[edit | edit source]
Foreign Humanitarian Assistance[edit | edit source]
CHAPTER V: INFRASTRUCTURE[edit | edit source]
General[edit | edit source]
Start where you are, and work out from your skin to the edge of what you own and use.
For me, my clothes are mostly imported and/or high tech fabrics, then there is this laptop I'm writing on containing dozens of incredibly refined components, requiring tens of billions of dollars of capital to create. It plugs into 120V AC power. That runs back to another trillion dollars of capital: the National Grid. The lights over head are CFL, imported from China. The wireless internet connection goes to a cable modem, running over incredibly expensive buried copper wires laid to carry yesterday's-big-thing, Cable TV. The water I'm drinking is drawn from Lake Michigan, filtered and purified by a giant factory, and fed to my house through a baroque system of sterile pipes - another few hundred million, right there. The house I am in is, in itself, another couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of capital, and relies extensively on the availability of lumber, shingles, glass.
This is modernity: a pile of capital, of sunk costs, running into the quadrillions of dollars. This is the amount of capital that it takes to provide average Americans or Europeans with our lifestyle. --Envisioning a Leapfrogged World - 2005 essay from Vinay Gupta on infrastructure
Understanding infrastructure as an expression of capital is key to developing infrastructures for chaotic situations without much money. The things required for successful investment - good knowledge of conditions, an accurate map of the future, stability, security and connected economies - are also critical to successful deployments of large scale infrastructure. If you think of infrastructure investment as a form of banking it helps spark insight into the problems encountered in SSTR operations. (For more on infrastructure investments as financial investments, see Small is Profitable - a book on the subject from the [http://rmi.org/ Rocky Mountain Institute.)
The equation is something like this: costs are sunk in the form of capital investment on behalf of a population. This population then derives services from the physical plant purchased on their behalf. That's kind of like the "dividend" of the investment - services returned.
But, with all investments, there is risk: generators die, or fuel prices spike, or conditions change and half the population has to leave the service area of their infrastructure system. Infrastructure is investment, and investment has risk.
TIDES partly works with this model as a way to finding infrastructures which offer much more robustness and reliability - lower risk - for a given level of investment. Often the trade-off is between quality of service and availability of service: "less, but reliable" is chosen rather than "more, but fragile."
I can't recommend "Small is Profitable" enough for people who are serious about this stuff. It's 400 pages of the most in-depth study of distributed infrastructure theory, economics and practice you can imagine, and typically takes about a year to read by the time you've chased references. But it's worth it if you have the need to know.
Styles of Infrastructure[edit | edit source]
Centralized Infrastructure[edit | edit source]
- Giant power stations, connected by an all-embracing electrical grid. Who pays for the grid?
- Centralized water purification plant, connected to your house by a pipe network. Who pays for the pipes?
- Enormous gas terminal, connected to your house by another pipe network. Same question.
- One sewage treatment facility per town, connected by the sewer mains. Big engineering.
To pith this problem, realize that there is a patten of investment which generates and maintains this kind of infrastructure. The $300,000,000 to build a new power plant doesn't come from nowhere. It is produced by the entire history of power plant investment, by the stability of the banking system, by the availability of heavy engineering companies, by an accurate and reasonable forecast of future power demand and profitability, and so on. Centralized infrastructure is dependent on a highly complex system which is largely invisible to people who aren't in the business of building power plants.
So when you take this kind of model, and look at the price of electricity produced using this model, you say "this is very very cheap" - and it is. It is cheap because of the trillions of dollars of sunk costs which contribute to making it cheap.
Infrastructure in countries without this capital base cannot match these price/performance numbers.
If there is insufficient stabilized capital infrastructure and social infrastructure to maintain these systems, they die.
Hybrid Infrastructure[edit | edit source]
The standard military approach is "hybrid infrastructure" or "last thousand miles by plane" if you prefer.
You still have the enormous sunk costs back home, and then the infrastructure services are packaged up into modular, transportable pieces and sent out a chunk at a time as needed. An MRE or a genset are expressions of centralized infrastructure packaged up for shipping and use in the field.
The key here is the supply chain. The MRE eaten today is replaced (under ideal conditions). The genset has a maintenance and spare parts system right behind it. This supply chain is the equivalent to the pipes and wires. Centralized facilities at the end of the supply chain produce services and then these services are carried over highly resilient logistics infrastructure to the end-users, rather than over the fragile pipe and wire system.
Obviously this approach tries, as much as possible, to concentrate resilience forward. But the length of operations if the supply chain is completely withdrawn is short.
In the TIDES context, we are frequently going to be dealing with the transition from hybrid infrastructure to distributed infrastructure, as populations are settled and troops or peace-keepers withdrawn. Anything which still relies on a supply chain is going to become unreliable.
Distributed Infrastructure[edit | edit source]
Distributed infrastructure is the most resilient infrastructure available, but resilience comes at a price. Watt for watt, costs appear to be higher for electricity. Water may taste funny. Lights illuminate the page or the table, not the room. But, done right, when the trucks stop coming, the lights stay on, the water remains drinkable, and life goes on.
Efficiency and distributed infrastructure go hand in hand. If you are going to run a lighting system on solar power, the 90% waste of an incandescent bulb is going to cost you $1000 of solar panels and batteries to support. Because the capital cost of the power generation is paid by the person providing the lighting service, it soon becomes clear that common sense is to optimize the whole system: reduce the power consumption of the lights, reduce the size of the panel system, streamline the charge controller and storage system and deliver the same quality of service at the lowest possible cost.
If, when you bought a light bulb, you had to pay for the capital costs of the national grid infrastructure required to light it, you'd quickly see the light bulb market change in revolutionary ways. But because the capital costs in the developed world are masked by our model of electricity supply (i.e. fairly flat, low costs based on massive availability) we can't see the real efficiency landscape clearly.
But, at the end of the truck line, at the edge of the grid, the difference between $1000 per lit bulb and $30 per lit bulb is very, very visible. When the road washes out and the generator stops 24 hours later, what's left?
Hallmarks of distributed infrastructure[edit | edit source]
- Typically deployed as a whole system - power generation coupled with efficient end use devices
- Minimal requirement for external consumables like new bulbs or lubricants / fuels / etc.
- Modular and small - per household is good, per village is ok, per town gets into distribution issues
- Pipes and wires are absent, or are very short
- No centralized points of failure except in telecommunications applications (satcom may have centralized failure points)
- Individual entities (a person, a household, a school) own the system outright, from end to end, rather than "renting" power generation and owning end use devices (the classic developed world)
These, and other, attributes of distributed infrastructure are why it is so attractive in an TIDES context.
Key Facility Analysis[edit | edit source]
Protection, Restoration, and Joint Usage[edit | edit source]
Collateral Damage and Environmental Considerations[edit | edit source]
Financial Management and Asset Management[edit | edit source]
APPENDIX[edit | edit source]
Appendix A: Essential Elements of Information (EEI)[edit | edit source]
Appendix B: References[edit | edit source]
Appendix C: Administrative Instructions[edit | edit source]
Appendix D: Infrastructure Solution Sets[edit | edit source]
Overview[edit | edit source]
- Local Modification
- General Safety Considerations
- Training
- Sources of Supply
Shelter Solutions[edit | edit source]
Natural Shelters[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Use of Vehicles[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Use of Existing Structures[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Construction with Natural Materials[edit | edit source]
Lean To[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Litter Shelter[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Wikiup[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
Tents[edit | edit source]
- Summary
- Advantages and Disadvantages of this solution.
- Success Story (use vignettes)
- Safety Considerations
- Source (where did this come from)
- Investment
- Approximate Cost
- Needed Materials (Parts List)
- Labor
- Lifecycle Cost
- Logistics for this Solution
- Transportation specifics (size, weight, special handling, etc)
- Maintenance
With "soft" walls of fabric or polymer, tents tear easily. Patch kits may be needed.
- Sources of supply
- Instructions to Build/Deploy
Instructions for erecting tents vary widely depending on style and design. Tents usually use a series of interlocking plastic or metal rods to hold sheets of canvas, vinyl, or similar "fabric" in tension to form walls.
- Summary and description (with figures and diagrams)
- Step-by-step instructions
- Training Resources, Weblinks and Points of Contact.
- Implementation Guidance (hints and warnings)
- Cultural sensitivities
- Tricks and tips
- Interdependencies (Relationship to other SPs and needed Infrastructure)
- Disposal or reuse
