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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... |
My uneducated assumption was that you walked into one and sprayed your sand/particle blaster at the interior surfaces until you've got raw metal everywhere, then you paint the interior with a metal sealant, followed by a powder coat. Then set up heating coils inside, take the interior temperature up to 210 to 220 degrees C, go back and remove the heating coils and then be ready to start installing flooring/walls what have you.
But I have no idea how practical that set of steps are, or even if they are sufficient. Hence the desire to see the process that someone has used successfully to prepare containers.