Take a tour of UC San Diego and you might not even notice them. Simple 10-foot shipping containers, thirteen of them in total, situated in key locations around the campus.
These are emergency outposts that can be deployed at a moment’s notice by the Campus Emergency Response Team (CERT). All they need to do is pop these custom shipping containers open, and they’re ready to go, simple as that.
UC San Diego has a 1:1 student/staff ratio, totaling around seventy thousand people in all. That means that UC San Diego has one of the largest CERTs in the country. If something goes wrong on campus, they need to be able to deploy quickly and service tens of thousands of students, teachers, and employees.
When things go wrong, there may not be time to set up tents, wheel out trucks, and unload emergency supplies. That’s why they call it an emergency, after all. So, these secure storage containers make for a handy solution. Everything the employees and volunteers need in order to safely and quickly address an emergency, it’s all there, ready and waiting. Just open the shipping container, and you’re ready to go.
Why Use Shipping Containers for Emergencies?
An emergency station just needs to be a sturdy building, right? When you’re building a new library, you call an architect. You want the look of the building to fit in with the style of the rest of the school. You want it to stand for, potentially, hundreds of years.
An emergency station doesn’t need to stand for a century. It doesn’t need to match the surrounding architecture (in fact, it’s better if it stands out so it’s easy for people to find when they need assistance). An emergency station just needs to be accessible, sturdy, stable, secure, and sanitary. Basically, all you need is a metal box with a door on it.
So, a 10-foot shipping container is a perfect solution. It won’t tip over in a storm, the walls can’t be damaged by rain, and you can’t break into it without some noisy equipment. When it’s needed somewhere else, it can be hauled right over there. Shipping containers are surprisingly lightweight. A 10-foot shipping container comes in at around one ton, which means that it can easily be towed by most heavy-duty pickup trucks.
The key feature of a shipping container is its simplicity. When you were a kid, nothing was as fun as a cardboard box, because a cardboard box could be anything. A clubhouse, a spaceship, a Ferrari. The same basic principle applies to a secure storage container: it’s anything you need it to be.
Shipping Container Solutions
Whether it’s a 10 or 20-foot shipping container to serve as an emergency station, or a 40-foot shipping container to house a workshop on a construction site, there are a lot of good reasons for people to use these boxes in place of conventional buildings or tents.
Simply put they’re sturdy, they’re durable, they’re secure, they’re budget-friendly, they’re easy to transport, and they’re easy to customize to suit your needs, whatever those needs may be.
Convenience is a key feature for the CERT emergency station containers at UC San Diego. Even if you can deploy a tent in minutes, even if you can guarantee that the weather will remain fair, you now have to stock the tent with everything that you need in order to address whatever emergency it is that you are dealing with. When you use a shipping container, all of your equipment is already there, stocked, and ready to go. All that’s left is to pop open the door and man the station.
If you’re looking for a simple, effective, and practical solution to a problem, you can’t do much better than a shipping container. If you have any questions or you’re looking to get a quote on a shipping container, get in touch with Aztec Container and see what they can do to get you set up.
