Sounds like another half-baked "gotta do something" project.
What's needed is more quarantine areas the size of Javits Center or Moscone Center, not shipping containers, which are essential for ending the lockdown.
One of the problems with the shipping container method are you're distributing the facilities maintenance tasks into a distributed system of multiple failure points.
Another is that if you do lose cooling, containers rapidly heat up in the daytime.
yes I was also thinking about how hot the containers could get, especially in the upcoming summer months.
They could be useful though if it's really possible to just load them on the back of a truck/boat and move them. This way they could be shared between cities/states/countries as the location of the peak moves.
An ICU would already need air conditioning so might be less of a problem, while transportability would help with cases further away from main hospitals.
>>"Sounds like another half-baked "gotta do something" project."
Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something".
I understand what you are saying, this will be probably useless for the current crisis, but, who knows what could come from this kind of projects on the long term?
Maybe in a few years there will be an Open Source library of proved medical devices available to everybody.
They can just temporarily convert hotels, which are underused at the moment with the effective collapse of most traveling, tourism and business trips. Hotels have good rooms, air conditioning, power, and are fairly controlled environments.
And they have a lot of the supporting facilities and infrastructure you need in order to run a medical facility (kitchen, laundry, plumbing and locally controllable HVAC to every room, etc). It's way easier to rip out carpet than it is to add all that stuff to containers.
If you wanted to have cheap and easily deliverable ICUs you're probably better starting off with RVs since those are already designed around all the stuff you need to make a habitable space. Containers are great for transporting many at a time over a long distance because they stack and are also designed to facilitate fast and easy inter-modal handling (which is why the military uses them for certain facilities). Once a containers are within a few hundred miles of its destination they tend to move one (40+ft) or two (20-25ft pup trailers) at a time by truck which is the same method of transportation used for RVs (one behind a small truck or two on a flat bed behind a larger truck). Unless someone is assembling container ICUs in massive volume and shipping them across an ocean or rail transporting them across a continent I would be very, very surprised if the extra resources required to convert and ship containers to hospital rooms is lesser than the effort required to convert (and ship if applicable) existing hotels, RVs or any other structure already equipped for living in into hospital rooms.
Wouldn’t central air without HEPA filtration be an issue in a hotel setting? I don’t think it’s easy to retrofit (it can be done but not quick and cheap).
Can this dude just be the spokesperson for everything during this pandemic? Clear, concise, no bullshit straight to the point. Here is the issue, here is the plan, here is what we're doing.
> Another is that if you do lose cooling, containers rapidly heat up in the daytime.
A single mini-split can easily cool a container even in 120 degree heat. Maybe you're talking about 15,000 BTUs instead of 10,000 for very well-insulated traditional structure. But that's like a $300 difference. And right now, energy is dirt cheap.
Yeah, it seems like we have people with a lot of energy and even with some knowledge but without overall organization, those resources go to waste.
And altogether, we suffering, people are dying, through the lack of coherent, overall planning. The problem is a lot of institutions and processes are oriented to the Federal Government providing this overall leadership and the last few years of "starve the beast" policy making has degraded the Feds as a directing force, with the domination of polarizing ideology just icing on the cake.
State have had cobble together their own ad-hoc response, hobble by not expect this and also by not knowing what legal authority they're acting on.
As people already mentioned, containers are hot in summer. I spend couple weeks in a such temporary office. Daily 30 degrees, not enough windows, sweat and very bad smell around.
At the moment a school in neighborhood is being demolished and a temporary container building was assembled as replacement. It’s very comfortable and nice inside, though school has vacation in summertime and this application is ok. ICU in a container might be good for Scandinavia or Alaska...
You can put an air conditioner on them. I worked in a medical station built in a shipping container in the Afghan desert in 40 degree heat for a summer and it was fine.
The problem is, that there are enough buildings in other places than Afghan desert and containers make no sense at all. One can find many empty government buildings in every city. From offices left days ago, empty schools to not yet finished hospitals or empty exhibition halls.
You also need to consider the build out. I feel like it'd be easier to get the experts required to build out a mini-icu in one central location and develop methods to mass manufacture the standardized container than it would be to fly people around the country to one off a bunch of buildings.
Think about availability of doctors, not the ICUs. There’s a need to accommodate 2-3 shifts of doctors and nurses. And these are not endlessly mobile unlike containers.
I don't think it's about the building - doesn't matter what kind of room it goes in. It's all supplying all the equipment and connecting it up and powering it all. A shipping container is a useful pod to do all that in and then take it where it's needed - where the patients and doctors are. Like how they build hotels nowadays by shipping furnished rooms to the building site.
I don't know the answer, but if I had to guess, cost and availability. I've been researching containers, as I plan to put many of them under ground in concrete. A 9x40 foot in good condition can run $6k to $8k. I bet some people know places to get them cheaper. They are designed to be moved by trucks, cranes and ships. There are also many of them available in all locations that deal with shipping.
I do not know how much one of those mobile offices costs or what the backlog / order time for them is.
Prepper is sometimes used as a pejorative, but my goal is to document building a modern home under ground, step-by-step, including everything required to keep local governments happy. I believe that all homes should be under ground when feasible. It is the optimal path to a sustainable carbon neutral, energy efficient home while maximizing the surface area for garden space and minimizing eye-sores. This would be especially useful for people that live in areas of extreme heat, extreme cold, tornado's, hurricanes, flooding (if done right). If you are curious, there are literally thousands of videos on youtube of folks that have built such homes and they are very nice on the inside. Some people get fancy with tubes that bring in natural sunlight. The temperature under ground is about 50-54 degrees F all year, so heating and cooling is very easy. A rocket mass heater combined with a large stone heat bank can warm up an underground home in 30 minutes and keep it warm for days afterwards.
This isn't a new concept at all. It just happens that storage containers are very sturdy and can handle large amounts of concrete pressure. There are companies that sell / build these as fallout shelters, but they charge a lot and do not design them as full time homes. I am not going to link to the shelter companies, as most of them are shams.
A friend of mine has been doing this for some time. It works well but you're gonna need some iterations with stakeholders to make it work. This includes medical staff, transport experts etc.
What's quite cool about my friends engineering is that they manage to keep the containers sterile by pressure
https://hospitainer.com/
software engineers use "containers" to densify deployments. But in cases like this, real containers can't densify or offer mobility. Indian Railways engineers have submitted a proposal to mobilize trains for quarantine and mobile hospitals. Retrofitting is not too difficult and a prototype with designs have been shared. (even to SAARC nations, I guess).
‘A good idea’
According to media reports, a Kochi-based firm called Asset Homes had submitted a proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) where it offered to fashion hospitals out of trains.
“We have 12,617 trains with 23-30 coaches in our country. We can easily convert them into ‘mobile hospitals’ with facilities like consultation rooms, medical store, ICU and pantry,” the firm’s managing director reportedly wrote in the letter.
“Each train can accommodate at least 1,000 beds. Using the 7,500+ railway stations, the patients can be admitted to the trains.”
A senior railway official said it was good idea to convert coaches into mobile isolation wards, but added that it would be easier to first convert the railways’ Accident Relief Medical Equipment Vans (ARME) — or rail ambulances — into isolation wards.
“These are basically moving hospitals meant to provide medical treatment and assistance in case of rail accidents,” the official said. “It might be easier to convert them into isolation wards since they already have some medical facilities.”
Among other steps taken to check the pandemic, the railways have been instructed to introduce isolation wards at railway hospitals.
In what sense are they flimsy? They can support a few more (loaded) containers on top of them, so... fifty tons roof load?
If you're worried about impacts on the side walls, I'm pretty sure your tent is going to be even more flimsy. Your temp wood structure might well be, too.
They are only strong at specific points, namely the corners and to a lesser extent, the edges. If you have a load on top, or an impact on the sides, they deform easily and that can cause structural collapse.
In situations where people bury the containers, they often have to weld in additional squarestock steel pillars and ceiling joists to improve the structural integrity of the roof, and the pillars often add needed support to the walls that face substantial forces from the weight of the earth
My company works with shipping containers daily - we modify them for industrial and manufacturing purposes. We reached out to the CURA team several weeks ago, offering our capacity if they scale/deploy their concept. They are currently building their very first pilot unit(s), so we'll see!
As a basic structural shell, shipping containers are great - plentiful, compatible with global logistics, cheap, dense/stackable. But, to bring them up to habitable standards, let alone medical standards, takes A LOT of work. Hard manual labor and also precision assembly work. We have some custom equipment to help speed that retrofit process for our own purposes, but most container mod providers don't - so while yes, you can deploy finished units anywhere, stack them densely and connect them quickly, there isn't a reserve of these units standing by, and you have no scaling advantage up-front in manufacturing them right now.
I'll add that by the time you retrofit insulation, ventilation, utilities and paneling inside (and you have to put this inside if you want to maintain side-by-side stackability and weather impermeability) what was a "decent" small room size becomes a bit claustrophobic.
For modular, dense, deployable, and durable emergency hospital facilities, it's best to look at one of the many architectural prefab approaches - volumetric, panelized, or otherwise. See: BLOX, Blokable, FullStack Modular, Katerra, etc. This field is growing rapidly, and many of these companies are already tooled to produce room and structure modules very efficiently.
Some pose the question of re-tasking hotels as temporary alternative medical spaces. I could see it for housing medical staff in a more dedicated and perhaps centralized manner, if nearby a hospital. There are several military slide decks circulating around that describe exactly what's necessary to create a field hospital out of a hotel/office - including ripping up the carpet in the entire facility, heavily modifying HVAC (central or standalone units) etc - and that's all doable, but I've wondered about the implications afterwards. You'd have to basically rebuild the interiors entirely, battle future customer perception ("Oh, the hotel that 100 coronavirus patients died in?") and I'm certain the insurance situation will not be straightforward...
Is it possible to just pay a shipping container company up front to use materials that are more friendly for repurposing, with an agreement that you buy it after it is used? That way you wouldn’t necessarily need to strip and repaint it.
Certainly - the companies (mostly in China) that manufacture containers will do one-offs. They can be specified with less toxic epoxies and composite/alternative flooring, and any cutouts or other features you want to end up with. This avenue is expensive though. You don't have the economies of scale in comparison to "standard models" pumped out by the tens of thousands, and you don't have the advantage of shipping the container over full of goods instead of empty. Caveats abound, of course.
If one wants to avoid stripping paint and floors out of secondary market boxes, it's also possible to buy the constituent pieces of a shipping container individually - the corrugated sidewalls, doors + fittings, floor channels, corner castings etc - unfinished or with primer only. In this way, you can ship one or more deconstructed shipping containers INSIDE a shipping container! But then you have to fixture it and weld it etc, so you're back to losing economy of scale...
For our purposes, we usually use 1-trip/low-trip for client projects avoiding the nasty ones by careful selection, and we have a custom machine that media blasts the interior and exterior down to bare metal when we work with older WWT and partial/damaged containers of unknown heritage.
I'm no expert, but just looking at the hospital that got built so quickly in Wuhan [0], you can see that some sort of prefabricated modular construction units are involved. Do you happen to have more information on these?
Structural modular with offsite prefab, for sure, but I don't know any specifics on the Wuhan hospital builds. From some other coverage, the units appear to have ISO corner castings, but the proportions don't look like 'normal' containers. There are other proprietary connectors for volumetric prefab - like Z Modular's "VectorBloc" - but these don't seem to be using anything fancy.
What stands out to me, watching the time-lapses: SO. MANY. WORKERS! They are everywhere on site, moving constantly, and the equipment never sits still either. That workforce, along with the certainty that zoning and environmental impacts weren't even a question mark show what the "command" side of a hybrid economy can pull off.
I would love to see a walk through of taking a container of unknown origin through a process to make it ready for a living space.
My uneducated assumption was that you walked into one and sprayed your sand/particle blaster at the interior surfaces until you've got raw metal everywhere, then you paint the interior with a metal sealant, followed by a powder coat. Then set up heating coils inside, take the interior temperature up to 210 to 220 degrees C, go back and remove the heating coils and then be ready to start installing flooring/walls what have you.
But I have no idea how practical that set of steps are, or even if they are sufficient. Hence the desire to see the process that someone has used successfully to prepare containers.
Can't speak to living spaces since we don't do that, but you have the basic process in mind. You might rip the floor planks/panels out entirely, eliminating the smelly, pesticide- laden lumber and giving access to more metal surfaces during blasting. Or, much less ideal but possible: you can seal over the nasty flooring with epoxy then leave it or put another flooring layer on top.
Haven't heard of powder coating interiors - that would be a lot of wattage! - but maybe doable with radiant methods and insulation blankets, or putting the whole thing in a giant curing oven? Most often it's just spray-on epoxy over rust-converting primer. There are low(er)-toxicity formulations out there. For undemanding applications you can paint with household enamel over primer - wouldn't hold up on the exterior though.
Interestingly, the Cor-Ten steel many (most?) containers are made of is a weathering steel that forms a protective rust layer when left to its own devices. So you could conceivably just leave it there to develop a fine rusty patina!
All told, there isn't a single "right way," to clean up a container, but there are some best practices and trends. YouTube seems to have a wealth of folks documenting their container home builds.
speaking from experience as someone whos worked with shipping containers (tunnel, opentop and swap-body) repurposing these containers can be a bad idea unless you know exactly what was stored in them last.
Some containers come with their interior and moving parts slathered in Cosmoline and other toxic corrosion inhibitors. Others may have stored precursor chemicals to industrial adhesives or fertilizers. finally, theres no real regulation on what you can do with an over-iso (super heavy sticker) shipping container and many of them ship metals, or degraded plastics in various stages of recycling. Nuclear? sure. Walk through any port storage facility and theres sure to be a shipping container or two that will light up a geiger counter because the type-A containers inside have cracked from the heat and are leaking thorium tailings or other common low-level waste the USA ships out to third world countries and back.
Yeah. For repurposing, one-trip containers are almost always your best bet. It's much easier to know what was in them, and they're in great condition - I see people trying to do conversions on a wind&watertight grade container they bought not realizing that grade is still a rusty, dented mess.
> Nuclear? sure. Walk through any port storage facility and theres sure to be a shipping container or two that will light up a geiger counter because the type-A containers inside have cracked from the heat and are leaking thorium tailings or other common low-level waste the USA ships out to third world countries and back.
And here I was searching to make sure somebody mentioned methyl bromide. Holy shit.
Does anyone recall when Sun Microsystems was trying to build turnkey server rooms into shipping containers? I wonder if concerns like those you enumerate here were a minor hiccup or a major roadblock.
Given that shipping is down, maybe we should be looking at brand new containers for this as well?
Certainly, GGP has a point about modular construction being simpler, for sure. But the counterargument is 'can you ship them'. Anyone who lives near a port city is aware that there are train cars and semi trailers designed such that you can plop containers onto them.
What I don't know is how prevalent is the equipment to unbox them on the receiving end (or for that matter, whether the container trailers are rated for long-haul). That would limit the reach to the supply chains radiating out from ports.
I'd be more concerned about the radiation coming out of your cell phone or microwave or laptop wifi before losing an ounce of sleep over hidden shipping container radiation.
You'll get cancer from off-gassing plastic products before shipping container radiation gives you leukemia.
When China was building the special modular hospitals in 10 days, I thought why didn’t they just choose to convert old shipping containers instead?
Since it could be mass manufactured offsite, and trucked in. Then they’d just have to assemble it onsite.
Then, they could ship it all over the world, to hotspots that needs emergency field help.
But it turned out, ocean transport time is horrendous. It takes 21 days to transport from China to Los Angeles. Then, the time to load the ship, and unload the ship, and transport by land to the actual hotspot, would add another week. Then the time to actually assemble it onsite would add a few more days. So now, you’re looking at over 30 days to build that emergency hospital. By which time, you’d already have a bunch of dead people, just because it took you too long to transport it.
So in retrospect, it was probably better that they built it modularly onsite instead. At least this way, you can still fly the components to your hotspot.
63 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWhat's needed is more quarantine areas the size of Javits Center or Moscone Center, not shipping containers, which are essential for ending the lockdown.
One of the problems with the shipping container method are you're distributing the facilities maintenance tasks into a distributed system of multiple failure points.
Another is that if you do lose cooling, containers rapidly heat up in the daytime.
Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something".
I understand what you are saying, this will be probably useless for the current crisis, but, who knows what could come from this kind of projects on the long term?
Maybe in a few years there will be an Open Source library of proved medical devices available to everybody.
Not in regulated industries in 2020. Anything that resembles a medical device will need approval, and gobs of cash.
So far I don't think DIY ventilators or containers make any sense (ie. meet FDA approval), but homemade face masks seem ok.
If you wanted to have cheap and easily deliverable ICUs you're probably better starting off with RVs since those are already designed around all the stuff you need to make a habitable space. Containers are great for transporting many at a time over a long distance because they stack and are also designed to facilitate fast and easy inter-modal handling (which is why the military uses them for certain facilities). Once a containers are within a few hundred miles of its destination they tend to move one (40+ft) or two (20-25ft pup trailers) at a time by truck which is the same method of transportation used for RVs (one behind a small truck or two on a flat bed behind a larger truck). Unless someone is assembling container ICUs in massive volume and shipping them across an ocean or rail transporting them across a continent I would be very, very surprised if the extra resources required to convert and ship containers to hospital rooms is lesser than the effort required to convert (and ship if applicable) existing hotels, RVs or any other structure already equipped for living in into hospital rooms.
I can't find the clip right now but in one of NY Gov Cuomo's briefings they had an guy from (I think from the Engineers Corps) talk about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditio...
A single mini-split can easily cool a container even in 120 degree heat. Maybe you're talking about 15,000 BTUs instead of 10,000 for very well-insulated traditional structure. But that's like a $300 difference. And right now, energy is dirt cheap.
The Orbis plane, used in serial eye surgeries, works better than containers because:
1) the patients are only in the plane for minutes, not weeks
2) It's the only reasonable way to get specialists and their specialized instruments into areas short on both staff and equipment.
3) Most countries leave aircraft alone at an active airport. Anything else shipped can get looted.
The current plane is a former Fedex MD-10.
https://www.orbis.org/en/what-we-do/flying-eye-hospital
And altogether, we suffering, people are dying, through the lack of coherent, overall planning. The problem is a lot of institutions and processes are oriented to the Federal Government providing this overall leadership and the last few years of "starve the beast" policy making has degraded the Feds as a directing force, with the domination of polarizing ideology just icing on the cake.
State have had cobble together their own ad-hoc response, hobble by not expect this and also by not knowing what legal authority they're acting on.
At the moment a school in neighborhood is being demolished and a temporary container building was assembled as replacement. It’s very comfortable and nice inside, though school has vacation in summertime and this application is ok. ICU in a container might be good for Scandinavia or Alaska...
The portability also brings other benefits.
I do not know how much one of those mobile offices costs or what the backlog / order time for them is.
Why? Prepper?
This isn't a new concept at all. It just happens that storage containers are very sturdy and can handle large amounts of concrete pressure. There are companies that sell / build these as fallout shelters, but they charge a lot and do not design them as full time homes. I am not going to link to the shelter companies, as most of them are shams.
https://theprint.in/india/governance/rail-coach-as-icu-how-m...
Most related excerpts below:
‘A good idea’ According to media reports, a Kochi-based firm called Asset Homes had submitted a proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) where it offered to fashion hospitals out of trains.
“We have 12,617 trains with 23-30 coaches in our country. We can easily convert them into ‘mobile hospitals’ with facilities like consultation rooms, medical store, ICU and pantry,” the firm’s managing director reportedly wrote in the letter.
“Each train can accommodate at least 1,000 beds. Using the 7,500+ railway stations, the patients can be admitted to the trains.”
A senior railway official said it was good idea to convert coaches into mobile isolation wards, but added that it would be easier to first convert the railways’ Accident Relief Medical Equipment Vans (ARME) — or rail ambulances — into isolation wards.
“These are basically moving hospitals meant to provide medical treatment and assistance in case of rail accidents,” the official said. “It might be easier to convert them into isolation wards since they already have some medical facilities.”
Among other steps taken to check the pandemic, the railways have been instructed to introduce isolation wards at railway hospitals.
If you're worried about impacts on the side walls, I'm pretty sure your tent is going to be even more flimsy. Your temp wood structure might well be, too.
So how are they flimsy?
In situations where people bury the containers, they often have to weld in additional squarestock steel pillars and ceiling joists to improve the structural integrity of the roof, and the pillars often add needed support to the walls that face substantial forces from the weight of the earth
Meaning, the air inside is sucked into a bio-filter, and cleaned before released to the outside atmosphere.
As a basic structural shell, shipping containers are great - plentiful, compatible with global logistics, cheap, dense/stackable. But, to bring them up to habitable standards, let alone medical standards, takes A LOT of work. Hard manual labor and also precision assembly work. We have some custom equipment to help speed that retrofit process for our own purposes, but most container mod providers don't - so while yes, you can deploy finished units anywhere, stack them densely and connect them quickly, there isn't a reserve of these units standing by, and you have no scaling advantage up-front in manufacturing them right now.
I'll add that by the time you retrofit insulation, ventilation, utilities and paneling inside (and you have to put this inside if you want to maintain side-by-side stackability and weather impermeability) what was a "decent" small room size becomes a bit claustrophobic.
For modular, dense, deployable, and durable emergency hospital facilities, it's best to look at one of the many architectural prefab approaches - volumetric, panelized, or otherwise. See: BLOX, Blokable, FullStack Modular, Katerra, etc. This field is growing rapidly, and many of these companies are already tooled to produce room and structure modules very efficiently.
Some pose the question of re-tasking hotels as temporary alternative medical spaces. I could see it for housing medical staff in a more dedicated and perhaps centralized manner, if nearby a hospital. There are several military slide decks circulating around that describe exactly what's necessary to create a field hospital out of a hotel/office - including ripping up the carpet in the entire facility, heavily modifying HVAC (central or standalone units) etc - and that's all doable, but I've wondered about the implications afterwards. You'd have to basically rebuild the interiors entirely, battle future customer perception ("Oh, the hotel that 100 coronavirus patients died in?") and I'm certain the insurance situation will not be straightforward...
If one wants to avoid stripping paint and floors out of secondary market boxes, it's also possible to buy the constituent pieces of a shipping container individually - the corrugated sidewalls, doors + fittings, floor channels, corner castings etc - unfinished or with primer only. In this way, you can ship one or more deconstructed shipping containers INSIDE a shipping container! But then you have to fixture it and weld it etc, so you're back to losing economy of scale...
For our purposes, we usually use 1-trip/low-trip for client projects avoiding the nasty ones by careful selection, and we have a custom machine that media blasts the interior and exterior down to bare metal when we work with older WWT and partial/damaged containers of unknown heritage.
0: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-51348297/corona...
What stands out to me, watching the time-lapses: SO. MANY. WORKERS! They are everywhere on site, moving constantly, and the equipment never sits still either. That workforce, along with the certainty that zoning and environmental impacts weren't even a question mark show what the "command" side of a hybrid economy can pull off.
My uneducated assumption was that you walked into one and sprayed your sand/particle blaster at the interior surfaces until you've got raw metal everywhere, then you paint the interior with a metal sealant, followed by a powder coat. Then set up heating coils inside, take the interior temperature up to 210 to 220 degrees C, go back and remove the heating coils and then be ready to start installing flooring/walls what have you.
But I have no idea how practical that set of steps are, or even if they are sufficient. Hence the desire to see the process that someone has used successfully to prepare containers.
Haven't heard of powder coating interiors - that would be a lot of wattage! - but maybe doable with radiant methods and insulation blankets, or putting the whole thing in a giant curing oven? Most often it's just spray-on epoxy over rust-converting primer. There are low(er)-toxicity formulations out there. For undemanding applications you can paint with household enamel over primer - wouldn't hold up on the exterior though.
Interestingly, the Cor-Ten steel many (most?) containers are made of is a weathering steel that forms a protective rust layer when left to its own devices. So you could conceivably just leave it there to develop a fine rusty patina!
All told, there isn't a single "right way," to clean up a container, but there are some best practices and trends. YouTube seems to have a wealth of folks documenting their container home builds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQfmanHKCn0
How long does it take to manufacture one? End to end, like in this video.
Some containers come with their interior and moving parts slathered in Cosmoline and other toxic corrosion inhibitors. Others may have stored precursor chemicals to industrial adhesives or fertilizers. finally, theres no real regulation on what you can do with an over-iso (super heavy sticker) shipping container and many of them ship metals, or degraded plastics in various stages of recycling. Nuclear? sure. Walk through any port storage facility and theres sure to be a shipping container or two that will light up a geiger counter because the type-A containers inside have cracked from the heat and are leaking thorium tailings or other common low-level waste the USA ships out to third world countries and back.
And here I was searching to make sure somebody mentioned methyl bromide. Holy shit.
Certainly, GGP has a point about modular construction being simpler, for sure. But the counterargument is 'can you ship them'. Anyone who lives near a port city is aware that there are train cars and semi trailers designed such that you can plop containers onto them.
What I don't know is how prevalent is the equipment to unbox them on the receiving end (or for that matter, whether the container trailers are rated for long-haul). That would limit the reach to the supply chains radiating out from ports.
AFAIK they weren't built out of repurposed containers, but new ones. But I could be wrong.
This can also mean that anything you own, that was shipped via container, can also be laced with radiation.
Oh well, I haven’t died yet, so maybe it’s just a remote probability. The COVID-19 probably has a higher chance of taking me out instead.
You'll get cancer from off-gassing plastic products before shipping container radiation gives you leukemia.
E.g. https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelt...
Since it could be mass manufactured offsite, and trucked in. Then they’d just have to assemble it onsite.
Then, they could ship it all over the world, to hotspots that needs emergency field help.
But it turned out, ocean transport time is horrendous. It takes 21 days to transport from China to Los Angeles. Then, the time to load the ship, and unload the ship, and transport by land to the actual hotspot, would add another week. Then the time to actually assemble it onsite would add a few more days. So now, you’re looking at over 30 days to build that emergency hospital. By which time, you’d already have a bunch of dead people, just because it took you too long to transport it.
So in retrospect, it was probably better that they built it modularly onsite instead. At least this way, you can still fly the components to your hotspot.