November 3, 2012

Tweet roundup: Hurricane edition

Our Hurricane Sandy edition of the bimonthly tweet roundup features big ideas about infrastructure, flood prevention measures for coastal cities, a duel between two lists of appropriate technologies that can outfit household emergency kits and more. This is our latest roundup of tweets from the international community.

For up-to-the-minute updates from E4C on Twitter, please follow us at @Engineer4Change.

Wind and solar power generators weathered Hurricane Sandy well, and they were never a threat to public safety, as were nuclear reactors and natural gas leaks, Renewable Energy World reports.

Elevated subway entrances, seagates, surge barriers and even oysters make up some of these five solid ideas for preventing flooding in New York City (or any coastal city, really). This is a timely list by Atlantic Cities, tweeted by E4C’s Kasmore Rhedrick.

Gizmodo offers tips for updating Facebook and performing Google searches using nothing but old-fashioned SMS. Unfortunately, the site is impaired as of the time of posting, but here’s a link to Google’s cache of the page: http://bit.ly/PM4g4B And the article borrowed from this report at Buzzfeed, which lists all of the tips: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/how-to-use-the-internet-when-the-internet-is-gone

Before it flooded the US East Coast, Hurricane Sandy left a swathe of destruction through Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Univision reports.

We posted a list of ten technologies at work in developing countries that could also serve to flesh out household emergency kits anywhere, but Peter Haas, who heads AIDG, said our items were too expensive. He made up a $200 emergency kit from Walmart and Amazon in response. To add context, a day earlier we had implored the Twitterverse to “Upgrade your hurricane or zombie-apocalypse emergency kits with these 10 technologies for int’l development http://bit.ly/SaMZxj”

And in other news…

Willow Brugh found an attractive way to present notes and sketches from a workshop at IEEE’s Global Humanitarian Conference in Seattle, Wash.

One of the many interesting devices on display at IEEE’s Global Humanitarian Conference, the human-powered generator could fill a niche need for low levels of electricity off the grid.

It was lambasted by some as reckless, and praised by others as a worthy experiment, but whatever the opinions about his methods, Russ George’s adventure in geoengineering may provide some valuable data.

The new center will support green businesses and the development of off-grid technologies, water management and purification, micro-hydro, technologies for handling flood and drought, agriculture and bio-energies, Global Envision reports.

There’s a lot of talk about aquaponics as a more efficient way to raise crops and fish. The link offers a list of resources for those interested.

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