Stressed Power Grids and Climate Change
These are overarching concerns for cities, along with the fact there is a massive, worldwide migration of people into urban areas. While 40% of the world's population lives in cities now, by the year 2050 that percentage will be more like 75, placing greater
stress on an already stressed power grid. Worldwide climate change exacerbates this situation, bringing increasingly severe natural disasters more often, on top of our own increasingly fragile and complicated infrastructures that permit ever more devastating
manmade disasters.
What to do about that?
The citizenry needs to come together, within their own local communities, to prepare now before a disaster happens. In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, tornados in Joplin, MO and Moore, OK, the BP oil spill, Fukishima, and
countless other manmade and natural disasters, a key to these devastated communities bouncing back is trusting who they reached out to for help. As a natural response, those immediately impacted reach out to their neighbors and friends first. Governments
at the national and local level realize the need to work with an embedded and agile network of citizens, who have skillsets and operations already in place. These citizen networks can allow for an ad-hoc 24/7 communications network to exist independently
from the grid, so that people can still coordinate with each other in provisioning emergency resources like shelter, food, water, and charging stations and ensuring volunteers and needed donations get to the right places at the right time.
By being able to decouple from infrastructure that is down, we can keep the whole system running, bringing to life latent resources agile enough to spring to action in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Our Citizen Disaster Response Hub will install
Mesh Wifi nodes in a cluster within the city, and turn one building into its own microgrid that will be Command Central and decoupled from the main system during a catastrophe in order to run 24/7, no matter what. Through communication, resource mapping, and
educating communities before a disaster strikes, we can empower a community to repair itself. Functioning off the grid, these Disaster Response Hubs can be a resource the Red Cross, FEMA, municipal governments, and local Disaster Response Departments can utilize
at a grassroots level to work with those most impacted, while they are busy doing their part and who will remain long after they are gone.
Creating Resilient Systems
Building resiliency and redundancy into systems through an "adhocracy" is a worldwide movement that has only just begun. We can't just make our cities sustainable; we have to make them resilient too. Both natural and manmade devastation
requires our neighbors to rise up and rally in ways governments over the years have proven unable to do.
Our goal with this campaign is twofold. By thinking globally, we show other communities how to build resilient systems, providing tools and know-how for them to do it themselves. At the same time, acting locally, we implement the project in our own backyard.
With 20 solar-powered Mesh Wifi nodes dispersed within the cities' region, containing maps of neighborhood resources already filled out in advance, our locality will be able to respond immediately when a crisis hits. Thus, communications can continue without
long interruption, so that a community is not brought to its knees. Likewise, building sites that are off-grid and central to a community's response enables shelters, hospitals, fire and police to maintain their own power, no matter what. This enables your
local community, neighborhood, or city to not be fully at the mercy of the winds, or at the whims of crumbling infrastructure not under your own control.
But this takes planning, communicating, and grassroots organizing, which are already underway. We are asking for your donations to help us achieve our vision of a resilient region, and to promote resiliency worldwide.
Please view the video above explaining how the community Mesh Wifi technology provided by
WasabiNet and
Tidepools works. The below content explains how, with a 5 year plan, I can create a building site to function as a shelter and completely off the grid and as Command Central for a community during and after
a disaster.
Why Should You Care? Why Do I Care?
Instead of sitting around living with uncertainty, why not at least prepare for an uncertain future, so that we are not at the mercy of others? Why not become empowered to take care of ourselves, become connected offline and online
in such a way that whatever the Federal Government does or IMF or the FED or Congress or the EU does or WHATEVER .... we know that we will be able to manage within our own communities. We can't control nature; we can't fix corporations; we can't fix our governments'
debt problems. However, we can connect and prepare ourselves for disaster by building better shock absorbers in advance, to bounce back faster and stronger as a community.
I can do better than sitting in a chair watching helplessly as people's lives are wrecked during 10 minutes of a tornado or helplessly watching for 3 months while oil gushes from a borken wellhead destroying manmade and natural habitats.
I've worked for years in industry honing my leadership skills launching products, start-ups, and complicated programs commercially for businesses. These same skillsets can be used to launch and administer a Citizen Disaster Response Hub, rallying the community
to support others in need. This I can do. If I can help to spare peoples' lives of misery with a little upfront planning along with other community members, then we can all together create a stronger and more resilient method of managing crises, and indeed
bounce back faster and stronger.
"It's not about creating failsafe systems, but creating a response allowing other systems to fail safely."
