Husband and wife Zack Rosenburg and Liz McCartney traveled from Washington, D.C. to to New Orleans just a few months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in August 2005. Little did they know how the trip would change their lives, inspiring them to start an organization that would help this city and several others rebuild their homes and communities.
In March 2006, the couple launched the St. Bernard Project (SBP), which has gone from a team of three volunteers to a national network of AmeriCorps members who carry out this celebrated model for disaster recovery.
As part of a series of Google Hangouts On Air featuring service opportunities, NationSwell interviewed Rosenburg along with a current SBP fellow and an alum of the program. Click above to watch the full video. The conversation focuses on the work of more than 100,000 St. Bernard Project volunteers across cities including New Orleans, Joplin, Mo.; Staten Island, N.Y.; Rockaway, N.Y; and Monmouth County, N.J.
What do you want to ask the SBP team? Let us know in the comments below or tweet @nationswell using the #serviceyear.
In the meantime, click the Take Action button to learn how you can join NationSwell and The Franklin Project to spread the word on service year opportunities.
Tag: disaster response
Hurricane Katrina Inspired This Man to Revolutionize Emergency Housing
Natural disasters don’t end when storms subside or fires are extinguished. One look at the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina — which walloped the Gulf Coast in 2005, killing 1,833 people — paints a dreary picture of how human suffering continues long after the media has turned its cameras elsewhere. More than 1 million people were displaced during Katrina. A month later, 600,000 were still without homes. This figure shocked Michael McDaniel. Ever since images of Katrina’s mass devastation shocked the country, McDaniel has been working on building a better system of emergency housing — one that’s affordable, reusable, and most importantly, quickly deliverable. His Reaction Housing System’s prototype, Exo, fits the bill, and could revolutionize disaster response.
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Exos are individual housing units based on the design of a Styrofoam coffee cup. Each 80-square-foot unit includes a base, which acts as the floor, an upper shell, which makes up the walls and roof, and is equipped with lights and outlets via a special connector line. The units are private, with climate-controlled sleeping quarters for up to a family of four, and easily assembled. McDaniel’s idea is to store the components in centralized warehouses across the country, which can also serve as distribution centers during and after a disaster. That way, the Exo units can be rapidly transported from these facilities to deployment sites via any means of transportation. The company estimates that housing for tens or hundreds of thousands of people could be set up using the Reaction Housing System in less than 24 hours, depending on the event’s proximity to a deployment location.
FEMA’s infamous trailers, which cost $65,000 each, are mandated for one-time use, and can only be shipped one or two at a time, due to their size. On the other hand, Exo costs only $5,000 per unit. They are reusable, easily storable and can be stacked up to 28 per truck. In other words, the Reaction Housing System is much more cost-effective and usable in the chaos that surrounds natural disasters. With order requests from the U.S., Haiti, Japan and Syria, the only thing holding the company back is production. “Once we’re in production, the world is, hopefully, our oyster,” McDaniel said.
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Transforming Urban Planning With Discarded Airplane Parts
When Ball State’s architecture grad students learned that commercial airplanes have around six million parts, they saw six million opportunities to transform urban planning. Professor Harry Eggink created a virtual “playground for an architect’s imagination,” giving his students a chance to use digital diagrams to get creative without worrying about costs. They designed bus stops and apartment complexes from the would-be waste. Next up: disaster shelters, emergency relief huts and much more, all from retired aircraft pieces.
Veterans Help Disaster Victims Through Team Rubicon
Thousands of military veterans are finding that the best way to heal their psychological war wounds is by helping others. In 2010, Marine Corps veterans Jacob Wood and Will McNulty founded Team Rubicon, an organization that unites veterans in helping communities when disaster strikes. After first forming to assist Haitians following the 2010 earthquake, Team Rubicon’s 12,000 members have served disaster victims in 21 different communities throughout the U.S. and several places in the world, including Japan following the 2011 tsunami and the Philippines in recent days. Many veterans developed emergency-response skills during their service in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring that knowledge to Team Rubicon’s work. Veterans suffering from PTSD often find engaging in this volunteer work to be therapeutic, and bonding with other veterans while helping people in need is just what the doctor ordered.