Emergency Floor, to help People living in shelters

The world we are living today is not an ideal world; all around us we have battered individual either by natural calamities or man-made terrorism who are forced to live in temporary shelter homes. Most of these facilities lack a fundamental component of safety and well-being: floors. In order to overcome the problem, Emergency Floor is an initiative developed by Sam Brisendine and Scott Key to bring safety to refugee shelters and the people in them. With their new IndieGoGo campaign, Emergency Floor is working to provide efficient, inexpensive flooring that is directly geared towards assisting relief agencies.

Emergency Floor doesn’t rely on newly manufactured products to spread health and safety to refugee communities – their wooden flooring is based on wooden shipping pallets. Used for transporting materials in bulk to refugee camps, the pallets are often left underutilized afterwards. Emergency Floor designed a modular flooring system to sit on top of this practically free resource, providing an inexpensive and abundant way to keep families across the world a step above hazardous ground conditions, such as infected soils, flooding, and freezing temperatures.

Brisendine and Key were graduate students at the Rice University School of Architecture when they developed this idea to keep families healthier and happier across the globe. In partnership with the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter program, they were able to test prototypes in Sweden.

Emergency Floor has gained the support of USAID, provided Brisendine and Key’s initiative can gain independent support as well. With the money they raise, Brisendine and Key plan to bring Emergency Floor to families in Iraq, and families in Nepal whose homes fell victim to the recent earthquake.