Convoy

CONVOY

The convoy starts moving at 1 a.m.. Today is Saturday, July 2nd of the July 4th weekend, which we hope will be symbolic. It being a Saturday means the Tuesday–Thursday–Saturday dialysis groups will be affected first by our encampment, but all local dialysis patients will be affected by July 4th. Our fleet of 24 Freightliners (half electric, half diesel Cascadias) is pulling two dozen 40-foot containers. A dozen Ford 650 Box Trucks are carrying supplies and tiny houses in collapsed form. And a dozen Ford F-450 Duallies are pulling 5th-wheelers: predominantly Living Vehicle (LV) Pro models for their solar power. Two tanker trucks are full of mostly diesel with some gasoline mixed in. Two more are full of potable water. There are also a large number of Jerry Cans of diesel and gasoline, along with lots of other supplies including water in 3.5 gallon storage ‘Lego Blocks’ redundantly dispersed around all two dozen containers. We spaced the departure of each truck by about a minute, with an escort SUV for each vehicle.

It took almost an hour to get the final of the 52 trucks on the road. The first half of the trucks had parked before the second even started, so we only needed a couple dozen escorts.

Our encampment — is the parking lot of the mostly vacant Peninsula Boardwalk shopping center. Presumably the name ‘Boardwalk’ was meant to conjure an image of being right on the bay. It used to be thriving with a Toys R’ Us and other magnet stores. But the universe killed those stores, and only a rarely patronized Sports Seller eventually took its place. The shopping center is notable in a few ways.

First, it is right next to highway 101, the major corridor up the peninsula side of the San Francisco Bay Area. Billions of dollars and millions of people travel the 101, many of them to Facebook, Google, and Apple. Those commuters will see our camp in the light of dawn. The sudden appearance alone should be newsworthy.

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Second, the shopping center is right next to a canal. Once people lived in low-cost house boats in the canal and the adjoining marina. But the moorings for those inexpensive house boats were recently transformed into million dollar homes at much lower density, and the house boats kicked out. Affordable housing became insanely unaffordable housing in exactly the same area of the city.

Third, the parking lot is not being used even to ten-percent of its capacity because the car traffic to the shopping center is insignificant. All the people shopping there could easily use the nonfreeway side parking without having to compete for spaces. At worse they have to walk around or through the Stibnite, like they would in any indoor mall.

Fourth, the parking lot is quite large, and we can easily create a 600-foot x 150-foot (2 acres) space within it. The perimeter is established by the Cascadias and their trailers, where each is 70 feet long. Including some amount of overlap and redundancy, the perimeter is 3 + 9 + 3 + 9 = 24 rigs. Six of the rigs create makeshift sliding doors on each end. A hill to the 101 forms the NorthEast border, the Sports Seller forms the South-West, there is a bridge over the canal in the North-West entrance, and the main entrance is the rest of the parking lot to the South-East. Our encampment isn’t a fort, but you also couldn’t wheel up an armored battalion and just roll over us. At least, not without it being an entertaining scene to those on the 101.

The perimeter of Boardwalk is set up — as the last rigs (which become the doors) roll in. We are working rapidly to get the containers on the ground and stowing the chassis out of the way in the remaining space of the parking lot. If people take our chassis (or the exposed Freightliners), it will take that much longer for us to be moved.

The container access doors are all facing inward and test-opened to confirm we can get to the provisions within them. A couple containers have special side entrances because both of their ends are exposed to the outside. To speed up the process of parking trucks,

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the perimeter looks more like a very-squished hexagon. The side entrance containers are needed at the top and bottom, where all the other containers (except the doors) can face ‘left’ or ‘right’ as you look down on the hexagon. We lose a fair amount of internal space to the thickness/width of the containers and parked box trucks, but we still have more than 500 x 100 feet of remaining space… more than an acre. We have about 120 live people and two dozen vampires, so our density is a bit higher than the Buena Vista mobile home park.

The fifth-wheel trailers provide facilities — like bathrooms and kitchens, and the Living Vehicles (‘LV’s) also provide a large amount of Solar power. The models we have can extract over 3kW (kilowatts) from the sun at peak and can store more than 2kW-days (e.g. run a 200 watt lightbulb for 10 days on just storage). We ended up using eight of them to get 25kW and more than a kW-week of storage.

The LVs are also our primary dialysis caves, so are essential to our survival. We also have caves set up in the containers in case the primaries are targeted, but getting power to them requires either running wires along the ground or running a diesel generator near them. And keeping a container clean is more complicated than the LV, which includes several sinks and a bathroom. We did bring a large number of ‘cable speed bumps’ (speed-bump looking wire & tubing protectors) so we can run electricity and water where ever we need them.

The other four fifth-wheelers are all Forest River Sandpipers because they have two bathrooms. In total, we have sixteen bathrooms, which is quite luxurious for a group like this.

We set up twenty six tents — to mostly cover the grounds. The awnings extend down to 8-feet off the ground, so to a bit below the container heights. This enables the containers to protect the tents from the elements and avoided any gaping holes at the edges.

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The peaks are 20-feet high, so the whole thing looks a bit like a small circus.

Twenty four identical 40-foot by 30-foot tents run the North/Bay side of the camp in two rows of twelve. These are the most flexible tents, and can be easily replaced or moved. Assuming 8-feet by 6-feet as the allotment (‘lot’) for each Pico House, twentyfive homes can fit under each tent.

Next to the main collection of tents are two 20-foot by 240-foot tents attached tightly to each other at the center. These are ‘stilted’ up an extra four feet with wooden 4x4s so they can function as a driveway for tall vehicles moving anywhere along the corridor between the front and back doors. Box truck or SUVs with a large roof rack are taller than eight feet, so we provide twelve feet of clearance for them. Extra awnings prevented gaps at the sides and ends.

Finally, the LVs “fill in” the hexagon on the South/Mall side of the camp. With the solar-awnings deployed and after staggering them for easier movement, the eight units take up a twenty-foot strip on the far side of the driveway which they share with the other narrower fifth wheelers and the parked vehicles that we don’t want to hide under the tents.

With the tents in place — very little of the ground is visible from the air… unless someone crawls onto the twenty-foot high tents or hovers a drone near the gaps. The tents are white & tall, and enough light comes through the spacing that it is not at all claustrophobic.

Probably the least “homey” aspect was the freeway noise. The 101 was very close and there isn’t even a sound wall in this section blocking its noise. Only the containers, tiny house insulation, and any ear-plugs made sleeping similar to a more normal house. But many of the patients were used to much worse.

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The tanker trucks — are under the driveway canopy because they represent how long a siege we are ready to handle. We have much more water and fuel in jerry cans, but the image of 50K-liter triple-axel tankers would make ‘the man’ think in terms of months instead of days. We would rather ‘the man’ not learn that potential timeline with just a cursory view of our compound.

Pico Pico Houses are rectangular cubes — normally 40 inches by 80 inches by 52 inches high. These dimensions come from standard pallet sizes: a 48x40 and 32x40 are combined side-by-side. The houses come unassembled (floor, sides, ceiling, all stacked on top of each other), and are less than two feet high in that form. In an eight-foot high container or box truck, you could potentially get two per 40x48 floor space, or ten in a 20-footer, or twenty in a 40footer. We have less than 160 people, so need eight 40-foot containers dedicated to this, or have them dispersed in the box trucks. We spread all supplies around fairly evenly in case any trucks were attacked or crippled somehow. But they all arrived safely.

With the perimeter setup, the solar awnings deployed, and the containers all verified, about half of the group starts assembling houses while the other half rests or patrols. Although we use power wrenches to assemble the Pico houses, there is enough freeway noise combined with a large distance to any slumbering households to make us as quiet as a bat.

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