ARTICLE - WATERLOO - PROTOTYPE SHELTER

LOCAL CONTRACTOR SAYS HIS SHELTER CAN HELP HAITI
(Waterloo Record) - By Greg Mercer

KITCHENER — Clive Diggins hopes the solution to Haiti’s squalid tent cities is in his prototype standing in the rain outside a local Home Hardware store.

Diggins, a Kitchener-based contractor, has sunk $20,000 and almost a year of work designing and building a disaster shelter he says will save lives. He’s created an easy to assemble eight by twelve foot portable home, with a steel roof, toilet and rain filtration system — built strong enough to withstand earthquakes or hurricanes, he said.

On Tuesday, Diggins will fly down to Haiti where he’ll share his design with relief organizations trying to house an estimated 400,000 people still living in temporary camps since the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake.

He’s already pitched the design to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the agency co-ordinating the country’s rebuilding process. They’re looking for manufacturers that can build 32,000 temporary shelters at a time, and Diggins hopes to convince those decisions makers his prototype can be ramped up into full-scale production quickly.

“This will be a trip of discovery for us. We want to know what the people down there actually need, and what they actually want,” he said. “Our goal is we can come back with enough information that we can raise more funding.”

The shelter can be folded up into a portable unit, he said, and assembled by anyone with simple tools in a matter of hours, he said. It can also be joined with up to three other units to make a lager, more permanent home for families.

Because it has a self-contained sanitation system, Diggins thinks his shelters can help reduce the spread of cholera — a serious problem in Haiti’s ramshackle tent communities where hundreds often share one toilet.

Diggins, owner of B&B Contracting, has spun his shelter project into another company, Borders & Beyond. His shelters can be built for about $4,500 a unit and dropped into any disaster area, he said.

The whole idea began last April, when Diggins was disturbed by the images he was seeing on the news about the slow pace of recovery in Haiti. That night, his concept began to take shape.

“I had an awful nightmare one night, woke up, and designed this shelter,” he said. “Since then, it’s a project that’s become all-consuming.”

If he does get a contract to build the shelters, he said he’d start a small manufacturing operation in Kitchener. Without a contract, the idea will be stalled, he said.

“This project won’t go anywhere unless we get funding,” he said.

For now, there’s only been one shelter built, which Diggins is leaving on display outside the
Swanson’s Home Hardware store on Park Street.