Date: May 29, 2013 Author: Mac Cerullo Source: The Newburyport News (
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In the wake of last week's tornado that leveled thousands of homes and businesses in Moore, Okla., temporary shelters have become a critical component in the ongoing relief effort.
Visible Good, a 3-year-old company based in Newburyport, Mass., has dispatched four temporary shelters to Oklahoma to help house workers who are on site to assist with the relief effort and who have nowhere else to stay.
Three of the company's executives have been on site in Oklahoma since Sunday to survey the damage and coordinate with local relief organizations to see how their shelters can best be utilized. The hope was that the shelters could be set up Tuesday, depending on whether another tornado moved through the area as forecast.
"We're hoping that [today] we can construct them; we're just waiting on the storm," said co-founder Tina Newman. "It doesn't make sense to set them up if we could risk causing more damage by doing so."
The Rapid Deployment Module, or RDM for short, is a collapsible shelter that can be packed into a crate and quickly deployed anywhere in the world. When folded up, it can fit into a crate that is 7.5 feet long, 4 feet high and 4 feet wide, but once unpacked it can be set up in a half hour to create a 130-square-foot shelter complete with doors and windows.
The RDM is built to withstand extreme temperatures ranging from the intense heat of the Sahara Desert to the bitter cold of Antarctica, and if someone needs more space, two RDMs can be fitted together to create a larger structure.
Once the latest bout of inclement weather moves through, Newman said most of the RDMs would be set up outside a local church, with one of the four being used as a basic medical facility, another being used as a command center and the other two being filled with bunk beds to shelter displaced families.
Normally Visible Good sells each RDM for $15,500, but in this instance each unit is being donated free of charge, and the company is holding a fundraising campaign through Indiegogo on its website to help raise money to cover the overhead costs of the four shelters.
So far only $868 has been raised toward the company's goal of $54,250.
"We're trying to cover some of the cost of the buildings, and we're picking up the tab whether we end up with $10 or significantly more," Newman said. "We're a small company and we wouldn't be able to do this too often without some support. So everything helps."
Since the shelter was first developed, Visible Good has deployed shelters to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the Gulf Coast after the BP oil spill, and now the company is working on developing an improved version thanks to a $1 million grant awarded by the U.S. Army.
Newman and co-founders John Rossi and Michael Sabourin have surveyed damage from several disasters, and they all agreed that the devastation left behind by the tornado in Oklahoma is some of the worst they've ever seen.
Newman said they'd visited the school that had been destroyed, and over 1,000 houses surrounding it where children used to walk to school were just gone. In their place, she said, were trucks that had several feet of debris stuck in their grills by the wind.
"You can't comprehend how the wind would hit the front of the truck, and the grill would have two feet of grass and dirt that were pushed into it," Newman said. "It's really bizarre, and it's a sad, sad and chaotic sight, and it's miles. We've been pretty humbled by it all."
Visible Good and its staff have been live tweeting from Oklahoma on their Twitter handle since they arrived (@VisibleGood) and residents interested in contributing to the cost of the shelters can donate at Visible Good's page on indiegogo.com.
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