Researchers: Kevin Phaup, Savio Duong, and Austin Raines
Two earthquakes on April 25 and May 12, 2015, followed by countless aftershocks, left 2.8 million people in Nepal displaced. With many of the devastated in remote and rural locations, aid was slow to arrive and often impossible to deliver. Relief was unevenly deployed, with urban areas receiving the majority of attention and assistance and with many rural areas completely neglected. Deep immersion into resilient communities in the immediate aftermath revealed untapped potential to empower people on the ground to rapidly rebuild. PACK reimagines the challenge of delivering shelters to remote locations. Where traditional approaches focus on delivering all-in-one shelters, various factors limit the success of these initiatives. PACK differs by proposing to aid an often unskilled civilian population to quickly and easily build structurally sound shelters using bamboo, a locally available material in many earthquake-prone regions. This radically different approach to disaster relief distributes a easily portable template system that aids in constructing transitional shelters, rather than the costly distribution of prefabricated temporary shelters. The distribution of a single system, from which numerous shelters can be built, will be far more effective in reaching remote locations, where relief is often needed the most, and doing so in a far more sustainable manner.