Member Company Sukup Provides Shelter for Haiti Hurricane Victims
About 200 modified grain bins built by member company Sukup Manufacturing served as safe shelter in Haiti during Hurricane Matthew, which hit the Carribean in October.
The bins, known as Safe T Homes, are converted grain bins. Sukup manufactures the homes and works with GoServ Global, an Iowa-based philanthropic organization, which gets the homes to villages in Haiti.
“In 140-mile-per-hour winds, every single Safe T Home was left standing—a major contrast to other southern portions of Haiti,” said Paul van Gorkom, executive director of GoServ Global.
The partnership between Sukup and GoServ began in 2010, when Sukup provided Safe T Homes after the earthquake in Haiti.
Among the most often asked questions about the homes is how they stay cool enough to be inhabitable.
Sukup engineer Brad Poppen said that issue was among the project’s many challenges.
“After the Haiti earthquakes, Steve Sukup said, ‘Let’s work with an 18-footer and go from there,’ and that’s kind of where it started,” Poppen said. “Our safety director and myself, after the earthquake, started in the design process of taking an 18-foot bin and deciding what it needed. That got the ball rolling on how hot it would get inside it.”
“We wanted to ventilate it as much as possible,” Poppen said. “There’s also a heat shield, as we call it. We attach that to the top of the roof sheets, and it acts as a barrier so that the sun isn’t hitting on the actual steel roof. Of course it doesn’t make it air conditioned, but it’s like standing in the shade.”
The shield makes a 10-degree difference in the homes.
Converting the homes called on the Sukup team to redefine the purpose of the bins.
“The big thing in my mind,” Poppen said, “was with the grain bin you have to make everything watertight, and here we wanted windows and openings and ventilation.”
Safe T Homes have two windows and a steel door. Inside the home is a loft that creates additional square footage. Each unit can sleep 10 people with 254 square feet of usable interior space. In early October, Sukup reported having another 50 units in production.
Member since 1991 – sukup.com Source: Farm Progress