PVC Temporary Shelters

Providing temporary shelter after major disasters is one of the major challenges for survivors and relief and reconstruction officials. In Iran, besides the distribution of tents, a common solution is to construct and deliver containers to the damaged areas. Following the 2017 earthquake in Kermanshah province, extensive damage was inflicted on urban and rural settlements, especially in the Dasht-e Zahab and Qasr-e-shirin districts. The high extent of the destruction, the proximity to the cold season, the rain, and the problems of living in emergency accommodation tents necessitated the acceleration of the provision of temporary housing and permanent shelter. The present article is a report of an action research project to find a different solution to this problem. Experience shows that accident survivors, especially in rural areas, provide shelter for their families by the locally available materials and technology, or the materials remained from the destroyed buildings. Aware of such a capacity, we tried to take a step towards providing temporary shelter by making maximum use of local materials and some non-local but inexpensive and affordable materials. For the first time, PVC pipes were used as the main structure of a temporary shelter. In the first phase, in December 2017, researchers visited the city of Sarpol-e Zahab and several villages in the region for six days in order to identify and evaluate the conditions of the region. Then, the design and execution of the first experimental sample of this structure called Kashaneh with dimensions of 2 × 3 meters was done in the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of Shahid Beheshti University. During the execution, many points were identified and corrected, the strength of the structure was tested under gravity loading, and the structural calculations were performed using SAP2000 software. In the next step, the original sample with dimensions of 3 × 4 was built in the village of Kuik Aziz in the city of Sarpol-e Zahab. The willingness to participate among the residents and the positive feedback of the people towards the original sample indicated the success of this type of temporary shelter. Monitoring the samples, lower costs, speed of execution, participation of local labor force, ability to develop and attention to the psychological needs of the survivors in terms of similarity of the created space to a normal building, are among the advantages of this project.