8 ms·

Architects and engineers are turning old shipping containers into mobiled ICUs

115 points by engineeringp 7y ago

redis_mlc 7y ago
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.
- giorgioz 7y ago
  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.
  - p_l 7y ago
    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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- RobertoG 7y ago
  >>"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.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    > Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something". 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.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  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.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    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.
  - mc32 7y ago
    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).
    - ohples 7y ago
      Most hotels don't have central air per say, at least in the room. Each room has one of those standalone units usually near the window. 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.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  > 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.
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    Cooling fails though. And even in 70 degree heat a 55-foot container can hit 110 in the sun, as I learned lumping boxes one summer.
- ip26 7y ago
  There's a group of people who seem to see shipping containers as the solution to every problem.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    Thanks, I needed a laugh! 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 https://www.orbis.org/en/what-we-do/flying-eye-hospital
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  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.
lnsru 7y ago
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...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  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.
  - lnsru 7y ago
    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.
    - kaydub 7y ago
      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. The portability also brings other benefits.
      - lnsru 7y ago
        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.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
flooo 7y ago
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/ https://hospitainer.com/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
raghava 7y ago
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). https://theprint.in/india/governance/rail-coach-as-icu-how-modi-govt-plans-to-beat-healthcare-gaps-in-remote-areas/388043/ 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
magwa101 7y ago
These things are flimsy AF. Better off with tents or temp wood structures.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  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. So how are they flimsy?
  - deftnerd 7y ago
    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
- blackrock 7y ago
  This is a respiratory disease, so one of the requirements for this, is to have negative pressure. Meaning, the air inside is sucked into a bio-filter, and cleaned before released to the outside atmosphere.
wigiv 7y ago
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...
- abakker 7y ago
  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.
nimbius 7y ago
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.
- jacobush 7y ago
  "Super heavy sticker" means it's overweight from what the ISO standard says a shipping container should maximally weigh?
- thaeli 7y ago
  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.
- orblivion 7y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
Why use shipping containers when portable shelters exist? E.g. https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelter/ https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelt...
- lreeves 7y ago
  Presumably because there's millions of excess containers and that site you've linked builds those on demand?
dang 7y ago
We changed the URL from https://www.engineeringpassion.com/engineers-are-converting-old-shipping-containers-into-mobile-icus/ https://www.engineeringpassion.com/engineers-are-converting-... to the article it copied from.
blackrock 7y ago
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.

115 points by engineeringp 7y ago

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.

giorgioz 7y ago
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.
- p_l 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RobertoG 7y ago
>>"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.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something". 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.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
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.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  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.
- mc32 7y ago
  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).
  - ohples 7y ago
    Most hotels don't have central air per say, at least in the room. Each room has one of those standalone units usually near the window. 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.
dcolkitt 7y ago
> 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.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Cooling fails though. And even in 70 degree heat a 55-foot container can hit 110 in the sun, as I learned lumping boxes one summer.
ip26 7y ago
There's a group of people who seem to see shipping containers as the solution to every problem.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Thanks, I needed a laugh! 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 https://www.orbis.org/en/what-we-do/flying-eye-hospital
joe_the_user 7y ago
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.

lnsru 7y ago

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...

chrisseaton 7y ago
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.
- lnsru 7y ago
  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.
  - kaydub 7y ago
    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. The portability also brings other benefits.
    - lnsru 7y ago
      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.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago

flooo 7y ago

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/ https://hospitainer.com/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

raghava 7y ago

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). https://theprint.in/india/governance/rail-coach-as-icu-how-modi-govt-plans-to-beat-healthcare-gaps-in-remote-areas/388043/ 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

magwa101 7y ago

These things are flimsy AF. Better off with tents or temp wood structures.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
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. So how are they flimsy?
- deftnerd 7y ago
  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
blackrock 7y ago
This is a respiratory disease, so one of the requirements for this, is to have negative pressure. Meaning, the air inside is sucked into a bio-filter, and cleaned before released to the outside atmosphere.

wigiv 7y ago

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...

abakker 7y ago
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.

nimbius 7y ago

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.

jacobush 7y ago
"Super heavy sticker" means it's overweight from what the ISO standard says a shipping container should maximally weigh?
thaeli 7y ago
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.
orblivion 7y ago
> 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

Why use shipping containers when portable shelters exist? E.g. https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelter/ https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelt...

lreeves 7y ago
Presumably because there's millions of excess containers and that site you've linked builds those on demand?

dang 7y ago

We changed the URL from https://www.engineeringpassion.com/engineers-are-converting-old-shipping-containers-into-mobile-icus/ https://www.engineeringpassion.com/engineers-are-converting-... to the article it copied from.

blackrock 7y ago

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.