(iv) Tents and shelter. Hidden costs in humanitarian aid and emergency. TRANSPORT & STORAGE.

Is it just the price of the emergency tent the only important thing for taking the right decision when selecting a tent for emergency brigades?

When a buying decision has to be made, it is important to consider all its implications. To buy a tent is not just a matter of choosing anyone, like when one goes to the pastry shop, looks at the pastries and selects one for its shape, colour or by its expected taste.

For rightly selecting a tent the thing is something a bit more complex.

When a tent is going to be used in a future, and is not yet clear to what country or climate it will have to travel, and it is not clear either if it is going to be used just for people of one sex or both, if it is going to be used in a place where it is going to rain a lot or, instead, in a dry one, and the tent will have to spend part of its life stored in a warehouse waiting for an emergency to arise, and then be shipped quickly to a distant country where it is going to be useful for someone, then, the selection of the tent should take into consideration the different possibilities. 

The tent to be stored should include every element that could be needed at the emergency site, 

for instance, inner separating curtains, flysheet, floor, and others.

To store a tent should be done in an easy way, having packages easy to carry by hand and that can be stacked in order to minimize the warehousing space, and therefore reduce costs, and also making it easy to find the correct package when needed.

As all we know, when the emergency situation happens, there is no much time left to think and debate, is time to act fast, in order to help as soon as possible those who happen to be in the middle of the human drama.

Someone is going to pick up the needed tents from the warehouse and to prepare a shipment to the emergency site, the first shipments usually by plane. This person maybe do not knows anything about tents. At that moment it becomes critical to ensure that all the packages corresponding to the same emergency tent are shipped together and that the possibilities for them to be separated from each other are reduced to a minimum..., and that should be done with the minimum effort and minimun knowledge needed!

The tents will usually be loaded in a truck where the use of space is crucial, it should be possible filling the truck completely (without overload it) and then transfer the packages to the corresponding aircraft hold. At this time, it is also critical - before, it already was - the weight to be transported, as every kilo in an airplane counts a lot. To send an airplane plenty of emergency material is not cheap, to be able to send as much material as needed with the minimun weight, is a must.

For the above reasons a tent should be designed having in mind all these factors:

1) Minimun weight for maximun useful tent surface

2) Simple packaging including all the pieces that can be needed in different emergency situations

3) Better 1 package for a tent than 2 or more, as more packages, more easy to mislay one or to lose it completely. When one of the packages is not there at the emergency site, the rest of the tent can become unuseful.

4) Package shape should be as much as possible like a parallelepiped in order to there are no hollows left in the truck or in the aircraft. The rental of the plane, specially is going to cost mainly for the plane itself, so, in some manner we could be paying for transporting hollows, plenty of air, and, of course, we should avoid that happening.

5) As the tents are going to pass from one place to another, and usually not small quantities of them, the best way to carry a number of them, to fill the aircraft hold or to offload it, is with a forklift, but the best way to transport load with a forklift is within pallets. The best thing should be that the tents had pallet like size, in order to the load is distributed uniformly and organized adequately.

6) Each tent should be as easy as possible to be carried by human beings, as they are the ones who will put them in place at the emergency site before the tents are assembled.

To summarize, the big issues for pakaging and transport are:

• Minimum specific weight kg/m2 of useful surface
• Every element needed included in the package
• 1 package for each tent
• Package with parallelepiped shape
• Package dimensions compatible with international standard pallet size in order to fill it completely
• Easiness of carrying.

One of the things most surprised us when we began to work on this aspects of tents design, is that most of the manufacturers have ignored these seemingly obvious criteria, if anyone has consider it!

If you liked this article, please recommend it to a friend, thanks! Please leave your feedback.

(iii) Tents and shelter. Hidden costs in humanitarian aid and emergency. ASSEMBLY

Is it just the price of the emergency tent the only important thing for taking the right decision when selecting a tent for emergency brigades?

3. HOW IMPORTANT IS THE EASINESS OF ASSEMBLY OF AN EMERGENCY TENT?

Emergency aid activity is not a matter of money in the sense of money that can be produced by the people working on it, but it does not mean that the money or the hidden cost is not something important for the emergency activity.

How can influence in the cost of using a tent the assembly time and the people needed to assemble it?

This is the question that I am going to try to answer today.

The emergency, of course, is a matter of productivity, of urgent productivity!! It is important to be able to serve as many urgently needed of assistance people as you can in the shortest period of time, for instance when searching for victims of an earthquake under the debris of collapsed buildings.

Productivity of emergency services is something associated with persons, the persons at the emergency aid side, persons who must be ready to work hardly, so it is important for them using their time effectively. In such a context, it is important to reduce to the minimum necessary the auxiliary activities like the one of putting on a tent or caring about it in order to have the tent ready to use. All that can be done to ease the job of emergency brigades is going to improve their productivity and their capacity of concentration and to avoid annoying distractions that can disturb their work.

To set up an emergency tent would be nice if it could be done in a 'pop up' way just like modern individual tents can, but for big size tents - big enough to give adequate service to emergency brigades, as dormitory, canteen, command tent or others - it is something that has not been made possible yet. And I personally do not recommend a pop up one.

There are many manufacturers that are aware of that need and do their best to improve assembly time. But there is a difference between being aware and being committed to. Very frequently the real world is a bit apart from the manufacturer's specifications!

When you see that a tent it is claimed to be assembled in 3 minutes, it is important to know what period of time these 3 minutes are referring to and how much people is needed in the operation.

When it is a matter of assembly just one tent, it may be not so important, but as the number of tents increases the assembly time starts to become important and even crucial.

To be able of comparing the assembly time associated to different tents, it is important to have a truly comparative unit. The most common is to compare a rule of thumb. But the mistakes made can be quite big. Even it is scarcely used, there is only one possible unit that can be used to make real comparisons: The unit to be considered is the man-hour or man-minute for shorter operations.

Of course is not the same A) to assemble a tent in 5 minutes, with 4 people that B) to assemble one in 8 minutes, with 2 people. In the case A) in fact 5x4=20 minutes-man are needed to assemble the tent while in B) 8x2=16 minutes are needed: 4 minutes less, a 20% of time less than in case A)!!

But why it is important also to refer to the same period of time? The time for tent's assembly should be considered from the moment it is going to be placed at the site where it is going to be set up to the moment when the tent is ready for use.

Some tents are very heavy and they need to be carried by four strong man or more, or even by a forklift to be placed on the site. Once again, it is not the same thing to carry over a 100 m distance two tents, of same size and for same use, one being carried by 4 people and the other only by 2. And, of course, it is quite different to have a tent that can be carried inside just one bag, or to have two or three packages to carry. As more packages you have, the more time consumed in bringing them to the place where the tent is going to be used.

One more thing to be considered is the unpacking of the tent, it is not the same to have several packages that having only one, and it is not the same to have a easy to access boxlike package that to have one with a narrow hole through where to extract all the pieces of the tent. All these simple operations are time consuming and they need persons who performed them, so a wise way to compare the assembly time of several tents is to count all these operations in man-minute unit basis and then compare the final figures. It can led to a nasty surprise for you when you compare the assembly time stated by a manufacturer and the real time needed.

It is important the time needed to place every part of the tent in the right place in order to have them ready to be assembled.

Finally, it is not less important to consider how many tools are needed and how small the pieces are, as the smaller pieces in the package are, the easier to lose some of them while assembling the tent; as more tools or machinery needed, more possibilities of loosing some, not finding them at the right place, or breaking a tool. In case of fuel fed machinery it is also important to consider the inconveniences of fuel supplying.

It is not negligible the time to disassemble the tent and to pack it, sometimes the choice is to leave the tent there, but not always is the one desired.

MY CONCLUSSIONS ARE:

1) To be sure of how much time is consumed in an emergency tent assembly, it is necessary to consider:

i) Man-minutes to carry the tent package over a standard distance, 100 m for instance.
ii) Man-minutes to unpack the tent pieces and place them at the right position to easy the assembly
iii) Man-minutes to prepare and have ready the auxiliary machinery for assembly
iv) Man-minutes to assembly the tent.

2) The cost in man-minutes, or man-hours, is a non recoverable cost: When you lose time at the emergency site, you cannot recover it anymore, so, either you use more people for same tasks, or you reduce the time used in aiding victims.

3) Some hidden costs difficult of being evaluated are the cost of loosing tools or breaking them or the cost of loosing small pieces of the tent that must be substituted by improvised pieces not so efficient as original ones.

Next: Transport...

Please leave your feedback.