Surprising amount of hexayurt moop at burning man this year

[dar...@chaosreigns.com]

http://blog.burningman.com/2014/09/environment/moop-map-2014-roadside-poop-hexamoop/

'The second, more surprising 2014 trend: hexayurts. Large numbers
of broken hexayurt panels wound up littering the highway, scattering
little bits of styrofoam through the sage. Solution: Strap your hexayurt
panels more carefully, so they won’t bend and break when you hit
highway speeds.

“Wrap your yurts! They fly away, and once it hits the sagebrush,
it’s over,” says Ninjalina, Highway Cleanup Assistant Manager. The
prickly branches catch bits of foam and wood as they blow past in the
wind, creating an extended trail of littered brush.

“My truck alone picked up 64 contractor bags of trash, 30 tires,
20 yurt panels and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff,” Ninjalina says.'

[Dan March]

Hey y'all ~

When I saw the headline for this post, I imagined yurts at some stage of tear-down and loading getting blown astray - or worse, being abandoned (so I'd be interested in how that quantified). 

Of course, reading it revealed a problem pretty hard to miss on the roads away from BRC - just as darxus reports.  Bringing the large amounts of stuff - from art to experimental dwellings to costumes and consumables are all part of what make the experience what it is - so we deal with it better.

It's legitimate to call out yurts specifically.  There are more every year (because they're such as cool dwelling solution), but that really means we need to solve the transport problem.  It's kind of unique to yurts because it's possible and tempting to flap a stack of insulation boards on your roof rack and drive.  They're light.  But as noted, they're also fragile. 

Even though they're modular and collapsible, they do take up significant space in garages, etc.

Conceptually simple solution:  Store them more or less on the playa.  As I understand it, many organized camps have storage containers left on adjacent non-BLM land which are transported to & from campsites for each year's burn by BLC "facilities" guys (someone help me out with their official name... and contact info, please).

Real-world wrinkles: ..Attendance uncertainty, maintenance/repair/remodel/replace and on-playa logistics.  None of that is easy,  I got a little look at that by making almost 30 yurts, getting them to people (mostly on-playa), dealing with supplier delays, weather delays, entry delays, people not coming after all, unforeseen "variation" in user/owner setup and breakdown etc.  Then, "What's worth saving?" - which means cleaning up dust, messed up tape, dings, etc.  I'm pretty sure a significant percentage of yurts come out of the garage 5 years after their only burn and just land in the trash (carbon/general environmental footprint???). 

So it's not a "simple" solution.  But is there a better one?  It's certainly not a one solution fits all world either.  Camps and other groups carefully collect yurts and put them in the camp storage.  But not every camp does this for everyone all the time. 

Thoughts?

Dan

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[Vinay Gupta (Hexayurt Shelter Project)]

We have to get people off RMAX etc. and on to Hunter XCI 286 / Thermax HD and such like.

Have to. It's time.

-- 

Vinay Gupta    hexa...@gmail.com   http://re.silience.com

Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest

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"In the midst of winter,  I finally learned that there was 

        in me an invincible summer" - Albert Camus

[Adam Gensler]

If you wrap the boards in the tarp that serves as the yurt floor, these transport disasters would be virtually eliminated.  That and plywood sandwiching work quite well.  

Adam

Sent from my iPhone

[dar...@chaosreigns.com]

Is there a web page with details? I don't think I came across anything
about them when I was researching building my yurt for this year.

[dar...@chaosreigns.com]

It would be great if we had some kind of remotely solid info on how these
failures are happening. For example, a yurt wrapped in plywood and tarp
can still fly off a car if it's only attached to a roof rack, and wind
tears the roof rack off (don't remember where I heard of that happening).

Does the wiki have a page that points out the usefulness of strapping
through the car doors?

[Dan March]

It's all pretty variable, one vehicle to another, one person's strap-down vs. another's.  Yurts don't weigh much but on the roof, they get hit with a lot of air (a load of yurts on the roof dropped my mileage in half).  Plywood sandwiching is great at protecting the yurt's panels (as long as it stays put on the roof rack & the rack itself on the roof).  A strong, well wrapped & strapped tarp is probably a plus but a flimsy, poorly-wrapped/attached one often turns out to be a liability.  If you're in doubt about your rack getting ripped off your roof, then (generally) yes - run straps through the inside/under roof.

I wonder if BRC authorities could be stationed to look out for poorly-configured/attached loads and ask/require that no one present a significant/obvious risk of losing the load en route.  Maybe offer suggestions or even help securing stuff.  Sort of internal semi-self-policing instead of having the regular authorities pull you over as they become increasingly annoyed at burners' failure to contain their loads.

[Jason Adams]

I like Dan's idea of handling this logitistically. I mean most people are only using the yurts for burn, so a storage center not far from burn seems like a brilliant idea.  Atleast as a first step letting people store them there, so they don't have to get going super fast speeds with their shotty strapping. Then after that part is implemented we could work on some kind of off playa logistics team.  Just a big truck that goes around picking up already taken down yurts, tags their information on it, gives them receipt and brings them to storage.  

In the business world you'd just set it up, offer it as a service, like dan did building them... and bam probably would be a profitable business that solves the moop problem.   Not sure how having a charge would be received by burning community tho

[Dan March]

The distinction that seems to exist in some people's minds appears to be whether a charge is made/paid on-playa.  Obviously people paid me to make yurts for them - or in some cases to rent them from me.  Part of the deal for many of these folks was delivery and even setup/tear-down. 

I have to say, however, that for some people, this did seem to put them or the situation outside what we all hope is the "playa mentality."  One of my helpers nearly quit over how she felt treated by a couple of people we served.  Perhaps she was expecting too much; perhaps people bring more of their mundane world selves onto the playa than we - or they - would like.  I know I have this bad little habit I would so like to ditch, but there it was - popping up in the middle of a camp social gathering talking about food & morality.  I plan on working on more clarity, more reliability and better expectation management... as well as better designs.

One of the toughest problems in moving such a problem into a "service model" is "a lot of shit happens" that affects how much work & expense is involved in making it all happen.  One guy might be at his intended camp at the set delivery time (which one hopes to be a simple loop around the area - maybe once for "early delivery" and again for "normal").  He's ready and there's no problem.  Boom. Off the truck and move on.  5 minutes.  OR... The guy's stuck in line... maybe... or he changed camps and nobody you can find knows.  So you spend not just 2 hours with "early delivery" but 2 days.  So far "simple stuff" like, "Just come to Location A and pick it up/drop it off," hasn't worked at all.

There are solutions, but they have to be worked on and tested.... Maybe giant autonomous hexacopters with facial recognition... and drop-down mobs of coordinated assembly bots.

[Vinay Gupta (Hexayurt Shelter Project)]

Lug 'em to a depot and let people come across the playa to pick them up. If they need a trolley, they have to leave one of their camp mates as a deposit.

I'm just glad the plug'n'play camps are mostly in RVs.

V>

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Vinay Gupta    hexa...@gmail.com   http://re.silience.com

Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest

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"In the midst of winter,  I finally learned that there was 

        in me an invincible summer" - Albert Camus

[Jason Adams]

Yup, I bought a Yurt off someone one year, and he had everyone come to a central location to pick them up.

[Jake von Slatt]

I made a very simple trailer that used the front wheels from two bikes and then became our kitchen table with the yurt box as the top surface:

We hauled it from the Boston Hive down on Esplanade about a half mile out to 6:30 & I, no problems. 

I highly recommend 1/4" plywood sheets with yurt tape hinges for packing the yurt, it protected it in the shipping container quite well.

[Dan March]

Great hack!  Converting items or materials into things useful for other nearyby purposes is a lesson the playa teaches - but one we could benefit from in the mundane world as well.  Good Job!

[Jay Batson]

I very much like the idea of a centralized yurt-storage service.  A couple of thoughts:

• There's a guy who did this last year for me ("Black Rock Hexayurts"). He charged a very modest price last year ($75), but raised it to $300 this year. Sadly, his service quality was poor; yurts were not on-playa on the date promised, the yurts were buried under lots of his other camp "stuff", and he was rarely around when you went to find him. A solo person, unorganized, with poor standards is NOT the solution. (I found a different solution this year, but would still like a quality service.)
• Charging for this in advance of the burn is reasonable. The service must incur a fairly substantial investment to make this happen; having a predictable number of people / yurts is crucial to viability.
• It's also reasonable to require that Yurts be packaged to specific requirements. Because people are not likely to always comply with them, the service should have some spare supplies - tarps, ply, etc. - to "fix" those that are not delivered properly (at either end). By the way: 1/4" ply adds a huge amount of weight to a wrapped bundle; I used 1/8" satisfactorily.
• I LOVE the trolly solution pictured in this thread. These could actually be made of ply & some wheels with carriage that could be broken down for storage year-to-year. We could actually have / make a half-a-dozen of these to help people get yurts to their camp quickly (and back). Some form of generalized clamp-to-bike-seatpost needs thought up, so people can use their own bikes.
• I know a couple of camp leaders who store trailers near Black Rock City - generally on privately owned land. Storage costs can actually be fairly small.
• Purchasing used semi-truck containers isn't back-breaking. They can be had for a few thousand bucks. This can be recovered over a couple of burns, easily.
• I'd also consider some form of construction / arrangement inside the trailer so that yurts can be pulled off the truck randomly - without having to unload all yurts before one in the back can be unloaded. This reduces density, but increases practicality.
• We'd have to have people scheduled to be at the truck for early-arrival, and staying post-burn, so people who are there in those times can collect / drop-off their yurts. This should be volunteer effort.
• Costs / money collected for this service should only go to cover the hard costs involved; labor should be volunteered (in the spirit of BM). It should operate as a non-profit. (Note: This means, actually, targeting a very small profit each year. Having run a non-profit, I've discovered that unexpected costs always arise, which wipe out that small profit....)

I'd be happy to consider spearheading this, but would only do it if we had a fair groundswell of support.

Maybe we should start a new, properly titled thread to discuss this?

-jb

[Bob Waldrop]

I am not likely to ever make it to Burning Man although I am quite the fan and spend a lot of time watching the video feeds.

But I am something of a maven of what permaculturists refer to as "invisible structures" and the thing that immediately popped into my mind is that what y'all need is the Burning Man Hexayurt Cooperative.

Cooperatives exist to provide a service to their members.  If they run an operating surplus (a/k/a "profit"), then it is refunded to the members in proportion to their patronage (that is to say, the amount of business they did with the coop, which means they paid more into the surplus, so they get back more).  Cooperatives are business organizations that can facilitate the traditional self-help ethos that we see in barn and house raisings and other such communal efforts.

People join a cooperative by buying a membership share.  The group sets an initial price, which is usually the expected startup costs of the organization divided by however many members they think they can/need to attract to make it viable.   The coop is governed on a one member, one share, one vote basis.  When a member leaves, the coop buys the membership share back (although there can be restrictions on that if the coop is not doing well financially, most state laws on coops forbid buying back shares if doing so would endanger the financial status of the coop).

The whole thing can then be designed to meet the needs of the members. 

I will resist the temptation to give me entire 90 minute "What is a cooperative" workshop in this email, lol, but I do have such a workshop I do, as well as a longer 8 hour workshop for groups actually getting started.

There are lots of resources available to help organize coops.  I am not a lawyer, but incorporating a coop is not advanced legal procedure, and I have written articles of incorporation for one hybrid customer/producer coop (the Oklahoma Food Coop, which was the first food coop in the US to only sell locally grown and made food and non-food items, in business for 10 years, sales approaching $6 million total), the Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network (a cooperative organizing group), Fertile Ground Compost Coop (a worker-owned coop offering residential compost services in the OKC area). 

SO ANYWAY. . . I will help if y'all are interested in putting together something like that.  We can do it right here in this group (I'm sure Vinay wouldn't mind), or we can go into private email or another google or yahoo group  etc.

The first thing is to decide exactly what it is this cooperative can or could do.  This storage and transportation idea is one.

But another issue I keep hearing about in this forum is access to the Thermax panels which are often hard to get.  The Coop could organize "thermax bulk purchases" and deliver quantities of them to locations chosen strategically for access to the people who pre-order them.  E.g., if there are lots of people in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, portland, interested, the Coop might be able to arrange deliveries to those areas on a pay-in-advance-you-come-pick-them-up basis. 

Same same with any other supply issues involving the hexayurts.

So let me if anyone is interested in this.

Bob Waldrop
Oklahoma City

On 9/23/2014 4:46 PM, Jay Batson wrote:

I very much like the idea of a centralized yurt-storage service.  A couple of thoughts:

• There's a guy who did this last year for me ("Black Rock Hexayurts"). He charged a very modest price last year ($75), but raised it to $300 this year. Sadly, his service quality was poor; yurts were not on-playa on the date promised, the yurts were buried under lots of his other camp "stuff", and he was rarely around when you went to find him. A solo person, unorganized, with poor standards is NOT the solution. (I found a different solution this year, but would still like a quality service.)
• Charging for this in advance of the burn is reasonable. The service must incur a fairly substantial investment to make this happen; having a predictable number of people / yurts is crucial to viability.
• It's also reasonable to require that Yurts be packaged to specific requirements. Because people are not likely to always comply with them, the service should have some spare supplies - tarps, ply, etc. - to "fix" those that are not delivered properly (at either end). By the way: 1/4" ply adds a huge amount of weight to a wrapped bundle; I used 1/8" satisfactorily.
• I LOVE the trolly solution pictured in this thread. These could actually be made of ply & some wheels with carriage that could be broken down for storage year-to-year. We could actually have / make a half-a-dozen of these to help people get yurts to their camp quickly (and back). Some form of generalized clamp-to-bike-seatpost needs thought up, so people can use their own bikes.

-- 
http://www.ipermie.net How to permaculture your urban lifestyle and adapt to the realities of peak oil, economic irrationality, political criminality, and peak oil.

[Bob Waldrop]

P.S.  Coops often have volunteer requirements.  The Park Slope Food Coop on the east coast, for example, requires each member to donate IIRC 4 hours of work every month, they are a $20+ million operation.  Prices would be determined by costs divided by number of people using the service.  Everything is open and transparent.  Quality is guaranteed by member control and design of the entire process.  Money can be saved by requiring some reasonable amount of time investment.  Sometimes coops allow a financial buy-out of the labor requirement (usually priced at whatever the paid labor cost of the hours would represent, plus an overhead percent.  Others don't allow a buy-out because they want everyone to be part of the work, which has both ideological and practical/management notes within it.

rmw

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[Jay Batson]

Happy to discuss this. I think the choice of vehicle - non-profit, coop, other - should be determined by the person who is the lead for the effort.

IMO, coops come with lots of excess work….

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[Vinay Gupta (Hexayurt Shelter Project)]

Very insightful and appropriate, Bob. I think this hits the nail on the head nicely: I've kind of left BM deployments as "ad hoc" figuring that things would find their groove given time, and I'm very happy to see commercial production, but the moop problem is really a sign that something needs fine tuning.

I love the idea.

V>

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Vinay Gupta    hexa...@gmail.com   http://re.silience.com

Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest

UK Cell : +44 (0)7500 895568 Twitter/Skype/Gtalk: hexayurt

"In the midst of winter,  I finally learned that there was 

        in me an invincible summer" - Albert Camus

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[hal muskat]

Jay & others, 

Sorry for the confusion around pricing. The $300 was a multi year promotion. It is still $200 for one year. We could not afford to do this at $75, as I had to hire crew each time to move the 1.5” ones wrapped with 1/2 or 5/8 ply.

We had all our stored hexayurts on playa by Friday. My recollection was that yours was in the middle. When I left camp that morning, there wasn’t anything on top of the hexayurts. 

I believe I had said I’d have yours and the others on playa by Thursday if not early Friday. Our delay was due to our rental truck’s transmission issues which finally resolved itself when it just quit running. You were to arrive Friday night & pick up Saturday morning, according to your Aug email. 

Deepest apologies if we inconvenienced you. It and we, will be better next year. 

Changes for next year:

Staging around 6:00 & deep ring road, on playa.

Crew camped at site from Wed - Monday of gates

Sunday & Monday Exodous

Your suggestions are excellent however for mass storage & transport. And, 1/8” ply certainly makes the stack lighter. After this year, I’d even suggest two stacks but that doubles the amount of ply while it does make moving around the hexayurt a lot easier.

Two of our stored hexayurts (1.5” H12’s) required three people to move!! 

We are re-desiging our H15’s for easier storage & transport and those of you who have these may want to consider this as well. We are taping 2x8 panels (two sections) to the H12 on playa. They’ve been properly taped for folding and stack into a 4 x 8. 

Storage containers may be the way to go. Suggest modified doors so that two can roll up on the 8’ side for easier access. Logistics for reclaiming one’s hexayurt on playa will still be a bitch even if stacked in reverse according to arrival, if people are late. (as happened with us this year).

There may be storage space available for containers on private property, just south of the BM ranch about 10 miles north of Pt 1. (12 mile gate).

According to a friend in the org (who has built and lived in a hexayurt on playa), most of the hexayurt moop picked up along the highway was NOT RMax, but cardboard insulation and other cheap insulation products. 

Wrapping in tarp or plastic prior to any trip is a must. 

Would be great to have a couple of people from this page, either stay, or return to BRC next year to join the highway resto teams. 

Cheers & Peace, Phoenix