The frightening increase in the incidence of natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes floods and wildfires around the world has continued to highlight mankind’s need for rapidly-deployable emergency housing.
Gizmag has reported many clever designs for emergency housing over the last decade, but Peter Anthony’s collapsible, lightweight mobile platform is the most viable we’ve yet seen for airdropping and rapidly-deploying housing for large numbers of people. Each self-contained 8′(2.4m) x 8′ x 8′ living space is constructed of composite material, and hence weighs less than 200 pounds (90.7 kg), folds flat and can be assembled with a single spanner by two people in less than 30 minutes.
Anthony has been a professional building designer for twenty years, but with the depressed housing market in his native North Carolina of the last several years and his recognition of the need for no-compromise efficiency in portable emergency housing, he devoted much of his time over the last few years to develop a system to mitigate the problem.
“This whole thing started from my desire to get involved in supporting relief efforts with disasters throughout the world,” Anthony told Gizmag. “I wanted to help so I looked for weakness in disaster response and clearly saw where temporary housing was a problem looking for a low cost but durable solution.”
The current design is a folding shelter system which expands to 8′ x 8′ x 8′ of living space and can be configured as long as 48 feet (14.6 meters). The simple transport trailer can be modified to carry up to four shelters along with off-grid support systems that tether with the shelters for extended use.
Weight was the primary design and development concern so the smallest offering comes in at under 200 pounds, utilizing a patent-pending lightweight composite panel system – another system he designed and developed to make assembly quick and easy for non-skilled labor.
“The shelter is simple, lightweight and portable,” said Anthony. “Traditional materials and methods have historically shown significant weakness, being complex and requiring skilled labor to assemble… Being extremely heavy, nearly all of them necessitate additional erection equipment and they’re costly in relation to energy consumption and transport and logistics. This system is designed and engineered to be a solution to the recurring weight to strength issues common among rapidly deployable shelter systems.