
Will Heegaard and Footprint Project – From BRC to NGO
Disasters happen. Communities come together to recover and rebuild. Governments and NGOs help however they know how.
Will Heegaard sees every disaster as a chance to build back greener. His non-profit provides power and water from nature.
· power from the sun – instead of gas generators
· water from the air – instead of plastic water bottles
He helped with disaster relief from hurricanes in Florida, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico.
He helped in West Africa, in the Philippines, and with the Maui Fires.
He helped with the LA Fires.
And he taught himself to create power and water from nature while serving as a paramedic in Black Rock City.
These adventure stories include laughter and levity in learning.
Transcript
STUART:
Hey invisible friends. I just want to acknowledge that when we recorded this episode about a month ago, none of us had any idea that Will Heegaard and his Footprint Project were about to go on their biggest and possibly hairiest mission yet: providing emergency power to areas of Los Angeles affected by the terrible wildfires that are still burning as I record this.
The Burning Man community has deep roots in Los Angeles. I have deep roots in Los Angeles. It’s my hometown. So many of my friends and colleagues are from there. It seems like we all know someone who is affected by this tragedy, and the extent of the loss is staggering. It’s heartbreaking. It’s nothing short of a family tragedy, both for my blood family and my Burning Man family, and our hearts go out to all of you.
I just want to express my appreciation to Will; to our friends the Solar Punks; to all the Burners Without Borders folks; the campers who are out there feeding first responders, giving support to the dispossessed, helping to keep people who need power for medical reasons powered up and online. I just thank you all from the bottom of my heart for helping out in my hometown and its time of need, and express my endless gratitude that I belong to such an amazing community of caring people who know how to roll up their sleeves and get things done when things need doing.
All right, let’s get this rolling.
This is Burning Man Live. I’m Stuart Mangrum. My guest today is Will Heegaard is Operations Director of the Footprint Project, which is a solar-powered, off-the-grid, relief and recovery nonprofit that brings mobile arrays, battery systems, to the people who desperately need it in the wake of natural disasters. We’re talking like the recent hurricane Helene, the Maui fires, relief work in Ukraine. Before starting the nonprofit, he worked as a paramedic in Minneapolis and in Black Rock City as part of our emergency services crew. His web profile says, I love this, that “he sees every disaster as an opportunity to build back greener.”
Hey. Welcome, Will.
WILL:
Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
STUART:
So you have a super interesting background working in disaster areas, both the self-created first world kind, like, you know, Black Rock City, and the deadlier kind. You were in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak. You’ve been to some places that have just been ravaged, and terrible situations. Tell us about that progression in your life, how that informed the work that you ended up doing today.
WILL:
Yeah. Well, thanks again for chatting with me about these stories. A lot of them are not mine alone. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to live or work in very, very unique scenarios like Black Rock City, which, to be honest I must say, was probably my most intense medical emergency trainings ever.
I would argue that the Rampart Emergency Medical Center, you know, the field hospital out in Black Rock City for the two weeks, roughly, that it’s popped up out there… I remember Humboldt General Hospital ten years ago or so did a study, and they claimed that Rampart was one of the busiest ERs in the country for the duration of the event, only topped by ERs in New York and Las Vegas.
STUART:
They’re dealing with gunshot wounds, and you’re dealing with, what, with playa foot and sunburn and maybe a bad trip or two.
WILL:
Yeah, well, drugs and dehydration and trauma go hand in hand, you know.
STUART:
It’s a terrible place… for humans.
WILL:
It’s a terrible place! No one should ever go. It’s no fun.
STUART:
So how do you get from there to adopting that as a full-on lifestyle?
WILL:
Yeah. When I say that some of my formative emergency medical training occurred at Black Rock City, I really do mean that. I left college with a goal to pursue a career in humanitarian response. I wasn’t a civil or mechanical or electrical engineer — key skills that would be useful in a response and recovery kind of humanitarian job — so I jumped on the emergency medical training path, got my EMT license and then my paramedic license. And while I was getting experience in emergency pre-hospital medicine, I started applying to international humanitarian response jobs.
And I got lucky to kind of jump on a surge team in response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and they brought me on for a month as a logistics officer. I was basically just counting pharmaceuticals in a tent in Tacloban, one of the affected towns in the Philippines.
This was like the second year I had ever been to Burning Man, so I had very early in my post-college life got to bounce between first world refugee camps and non-fun, very much less fun, emergency humanitarian contexts. And the parallels just kind of kept popping up in my face like the off-grid scenarios that people put themselves in out on playa compared to the scenarios that are un-chosen in disaster affected communities around the world.
So I found myself really just gravitated to how the challenge of applying lessons from large scale planned events, to large scale unplanned events.
And I feel like that is a meaningful way to have fun, too. Like, I love the idea that you could go spend a week tripping out in the desert, and it actually – you are doing that in service of the learnings that can be applied to people that desperately need it all around the world, and that just feels really powerful to me.
And I’ve been trying to take those lessons that I learned in Rampart, and other festival environments, to the disaster community, where they really do need innovations in mass care services faster and at scale in a way that we just have never seen it before.
Most of the disaster people are traditionalists, and they’re already burned out, and they’ve been on back-to-back disasters, you know. It’s only getting worse. So how do we find joy and take the events that do create joy and meaning, and really translate them into events that are extremely, un-chosen and challenge?
STUART:
That sounds so simpatico with the Burners Without Borders ethos. And I want to hear more about your background on the playa. But first, let’s dive a little deeper into Footprint Project because, I just learned about it when I heard about Hurricane Helene, which, as I understand, was the deadliest storm in US history. It was terrible. And we have a obviously huge Burner community out there and Burners Without Borders. But you managed to hit like 50 different sites and help them restore power. Tell us about that work there.
WILL:
It’s been by far our largest response ever, eclipsing our Maui wildfire response, and before that, our Hurricane Ida response.
I mean, we’re still a small org. We started in 2018. I was tinkering with mobile solar microgrid tech in my garage and offering it out to relief and response and recovery workers in the Midwest. Now we’re nine people, eight based in New Orleans, and we just hired a recovery program manager in Asheville area, which we’re super excited about because we’ve never been able to do a response and then be like, “Let’s get some roots in this. Let’s leave more than just tech. Let’s get some people in the works on this recovery.”
Oftentimes recoveries are three to 5 years, if not 10 to forever. I think about New Orleans, where our warehouse is based, and where we’re all based since Hurricane Ida. New Orleans is still recovering from Katrina. I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that this area will never recover from Katrina in the way that we would like to think. It’s evolving, things are changing. But the idea that we’re going to, like, get back to the norm, what was before, I think that is an antiquated vision of how disaster relief, recovery resilience works. The scars that communities carry from these storms are going to be carried… The idea that these communities are going to look the same after Helene or after Ida, or after the Maui wildfire… It might be comforting, but I think the longer we live through the large-scale intergenerational climate events that we’re living through, we need to be more honest with how communities are gonna survive the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 100 years.
STUART:
Can you define a microgrid for me?
WILL:
The real question is, can anyone define a microgrid?
STUART:
Okay, good. I feel less dumb.
WILL:
If you talk to three electrical engineers you’re gonna get three definitions of a microgrid. So just to be clear that it’s not clear.
I like to think about the difference between a solar generator and a microgrid.
A solar generator is a solar panel, a battery, and wiring, and an inverter. And that sun hits that solar panel, creates electrons, sends it to charge the battery, and then the battery gets drained to charge the blinky lights on your bike, or power that crazy speaker for Diplo, or whatever. That is a one way transaction. Sun gets poured into the gas tank, which is the battery, and then it goes out via a plug.
A microgrid would be: Alright. Let’s bring a wind turbine and also hook it up to that battery. And then you have two sources of power. You have sun and wind charging that battery. And you have people using it on site.
In North Carolina, we’re really – just for the first time had the capacity to activate two response teams right after the storm, meaning we had two trucks on the road with two solar trailers carrying bundles of solar and water technologies. One went to Florida and one went up to Asheville. As soon as we realized Asheville was the hardest hit and the power was coming back on in Florida really fast – Florida is very good at restoring power and water and stuff after hurricanes, they’ve done it…
STUART:
Well, they’re more used to it than North Carolina is, for sure!
WILL:
They’ve done it before! And it’s flat ground. The water comes in, and the water goes out. Well, in Asheville they pretty much never did this before. Water came up, and then it just ravaged, just torrented through these small mountain communities. So we moved that second team and that equipment up in the first couple weeks after the storm.
Yeah, the outpouring of support, and I think the combination of our human capacity, and we had been training for this for literally years, and for the first time ever, were able to actually activate in a way that could create a funnel of renewable response technology — solar, batteries, inverter technologies, atmospheric water generators, you name it — to create that kind of pipeline into to the affected community. We just never had the capacity to do that in a deep way before. Having the staff pre-positioned and those trucks ready to roll, that allowed us to stand up a response that ended up serving more than 50 sites.
STUART:
Well, I’m curious about how you triage a situation like that, because even if you’ve got a full truck, and you know, a dozen volunteers, there’s so many needs. And everybody needs electricity, but who needs it most and how do you get it to them?
WILL:
It’s a really challenging… That’s some of the hardest pieces of the work. We think about it like, identifying appropriate technologies for appropriate need. So does a mobile microgrid that can power a shipping container office? Does that go to the group that’s assessing home health care patients in the mountains for oxygen concentrators and CPAPs? Or can those electrical needs be served by a smaller system? We have a long list of equipment, basically, that’s coming in, and then we have a long list of requests, and our team is getting better with every storm at matchmaking, the “Hey, this group or this person or this site is going to be able to use this type of tech, while this site or this person or this site needs a small. Is it a small medium or large… extra large?”
This fall our request line was completely overwhelmed. The scale of need and the scale of equipment that was offered for either temporary free rental or permanent donation of solar panels, batteries, inverters, whatever, completely overwhelmed our systems, and it really came down to a combination of ‘first come, first serve,’ and then ‘trust the locals who know best.’
We take that really seriously when we’re going into a community that we really haven’t worked in before and is currently in the midst of their worst collective crisis in historical memory. We really do try to find people that know the communities that are going to be underserved, trust them to tell us where to go, provide them the list of tech that we have, plugging into the real grassroots work, and we ask them where it’s needed. Building rapid trust through high tech equipment offerings is what I think makes the work interesting.
STUART:
It relies on communications, and communications rely on power. So I imagine after a couple of days that starts to put a stress on the system. I heard a story about a helicopter drop. Can you tell me about that?
WILL:
Yeah. So we had brought a number of portable solar battery kits, those little ones that everyone bring to playa for keep their phone or bike lights.
STUART:
Or the blinky lights on their Mad Hatter top hat.
WILL:
Yeah, exactly. We brought a bunch of those. And, you know, the communications challenges in Asheville and the western North Carolina region made it an extremely difficult coordinating challenge, because no one could talk. We only had one Starlink in our equipment cache. When we responded, we couldn’t talk. Our phones didn’t work. I remember driving through Asheville being like, “Where is everyone?” Everyone’s milling around the fire stations, trying to get Wi-Fi and cell service; completely down. And it was like that for weeks after the storm.
So we ended up getting rapid pallet shipments of Starlinks in through the response networks, and we had a couple Starlinks available about a week after the storm. And then we had heard, we were talking to all these — when we could talk — talking to the other response groups and a bunch of local search and rescue kind of pop-up groups like, “Hey, we had chainsaw ourselves out of the mountain. Now we’re going back up the road to find the other people.”
There was helicopters dropping these caches of water, medicines and Starlinks. There’s this mass communal grassroots, whatever, amoebic effort to get comms to all these people that were stranded on the tops of these up these mountains where the roads were washed out and they couldn’t get physical, you know, trucks or tractors up to those people.
So we got connected to a couple groups doing these helicopter drops, and we packaged portable solar batteries; so the same stuff you bring to Burning Man, the little flexi panel that you hang over your tent to charge your Goal Zero. We would pack those up into boxes with styrofoam. The search and rescue teams would come grab em, and then they’d drop em from the helicopter.
The one time we knew this was successful – because it was just chaos for the first couple of weeks – we got a ping the next day from one of those teams, with a photo, because the guys doing the helicopter drops just sit in the helicopter, they don’t land, they just rope down the stuff to the people waving on the top of the mountain. We got the picture of the stuff getting dropped. And then the next day that search and rescue team, we were texting back and forth, and they said that they were able to identify the Starlink IP address that pinged the internet using the battery pack that we had packaged.
So it was just like really, for us, meaningful. We had never had search and rescue teams be like, “We need the stuff that you guys have so we can drop it off of a helicopter to people on a mountain so they can get on their Starlink to tell us how many people need air evac, or how much food, water, supplies they need.”
And the comms challenge, I mean, combined with an energy challenge… Your Starlink doesn’t work if you just, you don’t have anything to plug it in. And if you’ve been running your generator for a week and you can’t get down the mountain to get gas, you’re shit out of luck. You know what I meant?
STUART:
I learned recently that gasoline stations require electricity to pump the gas to you, too, so… I’m sure there’s a way they can dip a siphon down into the underground tank, but…
Yeah, I live in southern Baja, so I’ve just been learning about hurricane preparedness. We had a couple of pretty vicious ones last year. Yeah, it’s a domino effect, though, right? Not having electricity, we take it so for granted, and then when it goes away, you don’t realize how many other things were dependent on it, right?
WILL:
Oh, yeah. It’s a fickle… it’s a funny space to work in because it also goes the other way. As soon as it’s out, it’s like top priority. You cut out the US electrical grid, the blackout scenario: at day three, it’s when medications start going bad. It’s when food starts going bad. It’s when hospital generators run out of gas. There’s not that amount of time between the grid going down and pure anarchy.
STUART:
Cannibalism.
WILL:
Yeah. We got a couple more days. Hopefully. Hopefully. I know. What’s funny about it, on the flip side, as soon as you have electricity again, people immediately are like, “Oh no, oh well, it’s just going to stay on.” So quick. Our monkey brains are not conditioned to be like, “Oh, this outage lasted a week. Now that the grid’s back on, should I think about preparing again?” Like, I would hope more people take it seriously, but it is amazing how quickly people go back to “Hey, grid’s back on. Let’s, uh, go back to normal!”
STUART:
Unless it’s in Puerto Rico. You did some work in Puerto Rico after those storms too, right? I know it took them forever to get their grid back together, if it even could be considered that today.
WILL:
The sad part about this year’s hurricane season is that Hurricane Ernesto hit Puerto Rico and knocked out power for like a million people for over a week – barely even made the news; after Francine before Helene. If a million people lost power anywhere in the continental US, you’d think it would make – it does make major news. Too much other shit going on, didn’t even make a blip in the media.
But yeah, that grid, and the context around why it’s so fragile, is just a combination of socioeconomic and political factors that creates power outages. We’re trying to get more honest. There is a reason why Florida can rebuild their entire grid for communities… They went from three million people after Milton to like, under a million in less than 72 hours. There’s a reason why they can do it, and Puerto Rico is left stranded.
STUART:
And the reason is, yeah, money.
WILL:
Yep. Greed.
STUART:
Pretty much. “It’s the same old problem.”
That’s a great segue. Let’s go back to the desert a little bit. Oh, back in the good old days, back in, I think it was 2016; you brought your tinkering out there and brought a little green solar trailer. Tell us about that.
WILL:
Yeah, it was the first one we ever built. This is right after I’d been working in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak, and I had managed some projects that involved setting up solar refrigeration units for laboratory clinics in rural Guinea, which, I mean, a clinic is a very strong word. I’m talking about like a single-room brick building or concrete building with no electricity, no running water, etc. Um.
I had heard of, and then through my work there, funded some of the solar refrigeration units in Guinea. And I had come back, and this is in between Burns. And I came back and was like, “This solar stuff sounds cool. I wanna, I want to see if I can put this thing together.” So I bought a golf cart battery and a little dinky solar charger system on RENERGY, and mounted it on this green horse trailer that I bought off Craigslist for, like, 600 bucks, and brought it out to the desert for playa – and I think it was 2016 – and lived in it for the week.
And we used that trailer – my now wife and I – used that trailer to bring in one of the first larger solar battery systems that I kind of cobbled together with some donations and, partners to set up at Rampart. And the goal was, “Hey, let’s see if we can power the lighting for the Rampart Medical Center for the week.”
STUART:
Wow.
WILL:
And I distinctly remember switching out one – the Humboldt General Hospital infrastructure that was there back in the day; this is before Crowd RX had the contract; they had all their breaker panels… We worked with the Burning Man power team. I set up this solar battery array on the containers outside, in the front side of ESD, Emergency Services Department. That’s like the gateway to Rampart. I built this little horse trailer unit and lived out of that for the week. Set up a larger array and some battery tech to power the lights in Rampart. And it worked!
I was working with a nurse, and Burning Man Power, kind of all in sync to say, like, “All right, we’re gonna power most of the lights in the clinic. So, if for some reason at 3 a.m., these things die, and you’re like in the middle of running a code, and the lights go out, you’re going to have to run over to this breaker and switch this one into this one!”
It was a unique experience for me, because that’s what I love about Burning Man. There’s very few places that you can just be like, “You know what? We’re going to try to run emergency medical clinic lighting off of a solar battery system. And yeah, if the lights go out, there might be 30 people in here, we might have a mass casualty event going on, but we’re just gonna, like, try it!
I don’t think there’s other places in the world, very few places in the world, that are just like, “Yeah, let’s give it a shot. Let’s see what happens!”
STUART:
So did that attitude… Yeah. It seems like that maybe inspired you to just try some things and like, I don’t know, starting your own NGO.
WILL:
Yeah. It’s spaghetti at the wall. I think about all these stories that come out of that sandbox, and I say that literally and figuratively…
And it in many ways was that 2016 deployment of this little green prototype solar trailer, and then the Rampart solar battery lighting system (that now is resides with um Fly Ranch) was like, wow, this is this actually might be possible. We could power lighting for disaster medical assistance teams, and like this could cut their generator use significantly, even if we’re just running lights.
I remember coming out of that being like, this is not crazy. It might sound crazy, but it’s actually electrically feasible. And the cost for the system, to buy all the components and do it, it was like $10,000.
And we got some systems donated. This is before we’d even set up a nonprofit. So we were just like kind of cobbling this shit together. And that really was like a dart on the wall of being like, wow, we did it for an emergency medical clinic in a fun event. Now could we do it for a real one in a real disaster? Let’s, let’s see.
STUART:
So setting up a nonprofit? I know that a lot of people listening to this have had the idea I’d like to do that someday, but they just said what you just said, right?
WILL:
Yeah.
STUART:
What were the big challenges for that?
WILL:
The hardest part is the recognition that if it’s something you want to do, wrapping your head around, “is this a labor of love?” Yes. It’s always going to be a labor of love. But when and how do you decide how you’re gonna run it as a business? Because even nonprofits are businesses.
STUART:
Amen.
WILL:
We still have… We have a warehouse; we have expenses. What is your business model And then, how long can you go in setting it up? I went two years without paying myself, and it was brutal. It was brutal.
STUART:
Ouch. Until the fundraising kicks.
WILL:
Yeah. We incorporated in 2018. We were throwing spaghetti at a wall for two years trying to figure out who’s going to give us grants? How are we going to get pilot projects? trying to get traction. That’s the hard part. Setting it up is easy. Getting traction and figuring out who your clients are, who are the people that you’re giving the stuff away to, and who are your donors? Who are you taking stuff from, and funneling it to your client? Like, what is your model? That took us years, and we’re still figuring that out. We are not out of the woods there.
STUART:
Yeah, It’s never over.
WILL:
It’s never over.
STUART:
What’s your donor base look like? Is it mostly individuals, foundations, grants?
WILL:
It used to be like a third/third/third: individuals, traditional philanthropy and then corporate sponsors. Now it’s a lot more of the microgrid industry sponsors, and traditional philanthropy, meaning traditional grants. We’ve yet to take state or federal money directly, but we are looking at it. It’s just a huge hornet’s nest in terms of administrative reporting and box checking. We do have an earned revenue stream as well. So we rent our equipment to live events in the off season.
STUART:
That’s smart.
WILL:
The goal is to keep the equipment that we’re deploying to disasters in use. A lot of it’s in use in, like our warehouse here in New Orleans is 90% empty, which is great. We want it to be out there and being used. We’re going to have to figure out how to restock before hurricane season, which is scarcely months away, and then get ready for the next big push.
And we’re coming up on seven years of formal incorporation. The longer we do it, the more the solar battery microgrid renewables industry has kind of caught on to, “Hey, wow, if we support this group to get solar and battery and renewable technologies into storm ravaged communities, is in our interest as an industry.” And I think that changed the game for us. We have more support from corporate renewables industry space than ever.
And as we’ve grown up, that industry has grown up. I mean, back when we were buying lithium ion batteries for Rampart in 2016, I remember one company that I could find that was interested in helping out. Now there’s like 40 battery companies that have all gotten big as the renewable microgrid space has gotten big, and it’s only growing with data centers and power outages. I mean, there’s all these new pieces of the puzzle from the energy sector that, that are pushing distributed energy resource companies to grow up.
As they grow up, we’ve been on the sidelines throwing their tech into climate disasters. And I think we’ve become a lot more symbiotic. It’s in the company’s best interest to put marketing dollars into our work because their tech is going to get front-line use, and they can tell stories off of it.
STUART:
Showing so much human benefit. Yeah.
WILL:
It’s like a no-brainer for a lot of these companies. And they now have resources to throw around that this industry just didn’t have before.
STUART:
I’m still curious about financing because I’ve been going through your website. You talk about upcycling. Does that mean that you take in-kind donations of people’s older solar equipment?
WILL:
Yeah.
STUART:
Is it still useful? I mean…
WILL:
It depends on the stuff. I mean, we used to take anything that was free. And then we learned – well, we got burned a couple of times. And it was mostly, hey, we took this donation of 20 pallets or, you know, panels or something like that, and it turns out that they’re not working well. And then we get stuck with the recycling fees. So now we only we generally only accept large…
Yeah. In-kind donation management is a whole beast. And microgrid in-kind donation management is a very specific game. So now we try to vet the equipment ahead of time. We work with a few trusted partners. We’re a little more hesitant to just take random lithium cells and throw them into disaster context. We’ve been very fortunate.
STUART:
You’ve never piled disaster on disaster yet. Okay.
WILL:
Yeah. Risk. You know, we think a lot about risk. It’s extremely risky to have ten 5-gallon cans of gas next to five people smoking cigarettes at an aid station. That’s risky. It’s also risky to throw unvetted random lithium packs that someone soldered together in their garage. So we try not to do either.
Gasoline is, is crazy energy-dense, and one little cigarette… Uh, yeah. It’s not pretty.
STUART:
You know, in the early days of powered flight, there was a lot of opposition to using gasoline. Even though the engines were lighter, the additional safety issues… The early dirigibles… there was a big competition between a larger dirigible with some diesels on it, and a smaller, faster one with gas engines on it. It’s… It’s terrible. And I’ve seen it go bad.
WILL:
Yeah.
STUART:
There’s one other technology that you mentioned that I’m curious about. You talk about getting water to people. What sort of water systems do you deploy?
WILL:
So far we’ve been testing these units called atmospheric water generators. Our cornerstone tech is solar and battery microgrids to displace gas and diesel generators. That’s where we’ve started. That’s kind of what we’re good at. Well, we realized a couple of years ago that even if we deploy the best solar trailer that we can possibly build with the biggest battery that we can fund, and the best solar panels, and the biggest array that we can find – this happened after Hurricane Ida.
We would get calls from a site down in Dulac, Louisiana, where they had six Tesla Powerwall batteries on a mobile system and over 30kW of solar panels set up. So this is a pretty sizable array that we had set up. Pretty decent-sized microgrid that we temporarily set up in this field to serve this church.
We got this call “The system’s not working anymore. It was working great for three months. Now it’s not working. Help us troubleshoot it.”
We call them back, and we’re like, “What did you plug in? Something changed. You know, it’s been sunny here. What changed?”
They’re like, “Oh no, we didn’t plug anything in. Just six space heaters…”
And if you know electricity, a space heater is like a full 15-amp circuit. It’s like 1500 watts of energy consumption. It’s a significant load, right?
So I tell that story because we’ve started to now, in our evolution, look at how to bundle the energy production device, the microgrid or the solar generator, whatever you want to call it, with the energy appliance. Similar to energy efficiency stories that you’ll hear from homeowners or, you know, upgrading your HVAC to a heat pump, if you can solve if you can improve energy efficiency, you don’t need as big of a battery, and you don’t need as big of a solar array. Same thing with water.
So we’ve been tinkering with atmospheric water generators and reverse osmosis systems now.
STUART:
I’m thinking back to the solar stills that we were taught to build when I was back in Air Force survival school.
WILL:
Yeah, it’s literally that, with supercharged with electricity.
STUART:
Well that’s cool because, I mean, electricity is important, but I don’t believe it’s part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs in the way that water and shelter are. I guess if you’re crouching outside in a ditch, it doesn’t really matter how much power you got either, right?
WILL:
The atmospheric water generators that we tested in the Gulf, they were great during the summer when it’s humid, when there’s a lot of water in the air. It’s great. They’re rated to produce 10 to 15 gallons of water a day in humid environments. We haven’t tested them on playa, but I think if we dragged that thing out to playa, I would be amazed if we got one gallon a day.
STUART:
Yeah, the playa is about the most un-humid environment you can imagine on this earth.
WILL:
And it’s a pretty strong ratio. I mean, it’s pretty much just an energy-to-water ratio. You’re converting electrons, running a dehumidifier, sucking water out of the air, and then running it through a filter. So it’s really just how much power would you need to create water.
And what we’re now tinkering with is trying to figure out, can we pair a pump, like a hose that could go into a river, with an AWG, an atmospheric water generator, to basically fill a tank. So that you would filter water first and dehumidify or atmospherically generate water second. If you don’t have the river, you could use the dehumidifier. If you do have the river, you default to filtration because filtration – if there’s a water source filtering water is a lot more energy efficient than producing water out of thin air. It’s like a 100 to 1 ratio between filtration and atmospheric generation.
So we’re trying to figure out, how can we pair those climate technologies with mobile solar microgrids to offer kind of water packages that can solve the sustainability problem of single source plastic water bottles getting sent to disasters, which is still the… 90% of water aid in continental US disasters are pallets of plastic water bottles being shipped by fossil fuel trucks to areas that don’t have a water system or a power system. It’s like pretty simple chimp problem. The way of solving it is still in its infancy.
STUART:
I understand that you’re still involved in some communities that you have done disaster relief, like in Maui and North Carolina. How do you train and support local community organizations to get ahead of these things and create their own sustainable preventative measures?
WILL:
Oh, man. The best question and the hardest one to fund. So we often leave the tech with community partners in preparation for the next one, whether the next disaster is in that community, you know, Maui per se, or New Orleans, or Asheville, or San Juan, or nearby.
Our Build Power Program covers training and assembly of sustainable response technologies, meaning mobile solar microgrids, water generators, whatever, with community partners that we’ve supported after the storm. Unfortunately, training is the most needed thing between the gray skies. We could have people training community partners in blue skies if we had the funding. It’s the one of the most requested services we get. The training challenge is crucial.
We’re able to roll out a small training curriculum through a partnership with the United Methodist Committee on Relief. We’re collaborating on a grant to train their response teams on sustainable power technologies and atmospheric water generators and then inventory or stock a library of those units – portable solar generators, larger batteries, and water makers – for their response teams, which we’re really excited about because then it allows us to formalize some training curriculum. And we’re able to be like, “Here’s the menu. Here’s your options.
You want small battery for sump pumps?
You want medium battery for CPAPs and oxygen?
You want large battery for incident command centers?
You call. We’ll vet the need and then ship it to you, and you have to take the training, and then you have it for two to three months for free. And then we’ll reverse logistic it back, make sure it’s working, and restock it for the next event.
It’s a scratching the surface of training curriculums that we’re going to need to develop to transition disaster response and recovery efforts at scale, off single source fossil fuels, meaning gas generators, plastic water bottles, single source tarps. There’s so much more work to do.
We’re just really excited to be able to formalize a response curriculum for using these assets effectively in disasters. And then we’re when we can fund Build Power workshops for community resilience partners, we’re going to do it. And we’re going to be staging, maintaining, mobilizing, deploying, developing solar microgrids and renewable technologies for resilience out there.
The blue sky preparedness work pays the highest dividend. If you can get the stuff into responders hands before the power outage, before the lights go out, it is vastly more efficient. But the reality is that with disaster financing, a lot of our funding comes through in the aftermath of a disaster.
STUART:
Right. When the tap gets turned on, when a disaster is declared. Until then, it’s not.
WILL:
And when it’s in the news, and the media is covering it and, you know, that is the wave of support.
If there is one thing I can, I’d like to kind of push to listeners is that regardless of what resilience org / community orgs you support, consistent funding before storms is by far the most effective use of your donated dollars. So, whoever you trust to steward those for disaster-affected communities, if you support them in between now and May, that’s going to make the difference for hurricane season 2025. If you’re chipping in to a fundraiser in the aftermath of a disaster, great. Do it. Just know that the groups that were most effective in the response are doing it using dollars that they raised in the Spring. That’s how it works.
STUART:
I’m sure there are a lot of people who affiliate with Burners Without Borders listening to this. Do you have any volunteer opportunities within your organization, or do you have a relationship with any of their chapters?
WILL:
Yeah. We love BWB. They helped us crowdsource some volunteers to move some solar trailers up into Asheville in the aftermath of Helene. The BWB team is a huge, you know, supporter, cheerleader of our efforts. And we’re very grateful and honored to kind of leverage the net, the Burner network to do this type of work.
We do have volunteer opportunities available. They’re kind of piecemeal and hodgepodge. But if you’re interested in volunteering, please sign up on our website. It’s the best way to find out:
What is your skill sets? What is your availability? What is the right fit?
STUART:
Yep. There’s a lot of volunteer leadership expertise among our listeners here, so maybe you’ll get a bite on that.
Hey. Those sound like exciting plans for the future. Any other plans going forward to expand your capabilities, expand your footprint? What are your goals for the next couple hurricane seasons?
WILL:
Survive, number one. Just survive. You know, I think my big dreams have gotten very aggressively progressively more realistic.
STUART:
I feel ya. I really want Burning Man to survive right now, too.
WILL:
Yeah. Oh, man. I’d love to go back. That for me would be… I know that’s a personal goal. Not a not a professional goal.
STUART:
I know. We had the bad idea to schedule our event right in the middle of your busy season!
WILL:
I’m hopeful that if we can get a little more feet under ourselves, I could bring… My dream is to bring my dad out there before it’s too late. He’s never been, and he turned 70 last year, and I’m like, “Oh, man. He’s always talked about it.”
But now my goal is to get a team together that can manage the Gulf Coast while I’m out, you know, partying in the desert with my dad. That’s the dream.
But, in the short term, the scale of need is just, to be blunt, overwhelming. We do not have the people, resources, or funding to meet the level of disaster need that is out there. I actively responded to five hurricanes last year. There’s no way to do it all.
So, we are trying to grow in a way that is sustainable. I know that’s a buzzword, but there is no hockey stick solution to solving the problem that we’re facing. The tech is helpful. What’s going to keep these communities alive is locals helping locals, neighbors helping neighbors. Solar and batteries or fancy water makers are cool, but to be honest, it’s community organizing that’s going to get us through the next three, five decades of climate disasters. And we’re trying to chart a course that allows, that keeps us from burning out before 2030. That’s what I think about a lot these days.
We’re going to be building out our kind of Appalachian region response hub. If I could wave a magic wand, we could get equipment and a person to kind of service the Caribbean. It’s very regional stuff like, you know, staffing up in California is really hard because it’s really expensive to staff up in California. But yeah, I mean, we know that this type of work is needed in a lot of places. And we’re trying to grow in a way that doesn’t burn us out and, keeps the train on its tracks.
So we’re excited. It’s just my bandwidth for big dreams these days are more like:
- Survive.
- Take care of yourself.
- Take care of others.
Whatever else happens is icing on the cake.
STUART:
And then take your dad to Burning Man. I look forward – I’ll buy you both a drink when we do that.
I’m super psyched about your work. It’s so important, and it’s so innovative. And I’m really proud to know you at this point.
WILL:
Oh, it’s a pleasure.
STUART:
So don’t burn out. Don’t burn out!
WILL:
I won’t burn out until I’m on playa. How about that? Then I’ll go wild. I’ll find you. I’ll get you to get that drink purchased somehow. Proof of concept.
STUART:
Thank you so much, Will, for joining me. My guest is Will Heegaard, Operations Director of Footprint Project.
WILL:
Thanks, all.
STUART:
You can find out more about them at footprintproject.org.
You’ve been listening to Burning Man Live, a production of the nonprofit Burning Man Project.
Now, people ask me sometimes, “Hey, Stuart. Why? Why a nonprofit? Why can’t you just sell tickets to your festival and shut up?”
That’s a pretty easy answer. It’s because Burning Man is not a festival. It’s a movement. It’s a network. It’s a cultural institution. And, like any other cultural institution — your symphony, your theater, your opera, whatever — we can’t just rely on ticket revenues to pay all the bills. If we did, we’d be in a situation where tickets cost so much that only jillionaires and broligarchs could attend. We’d have to take on corporate sponsorship, all that crap that we don’t want.
We want to keep making the Burning Man experience accessible to people, not just in Nevada but year-round and worldwide. And to do that, we are reliant increasingly on philanthropic donations from lovely people like you.
And being a nonprofit allows us to offer at least tax-deductible status for most people who give us that kind of donation. So if you’re one of those, if you appreciate Burning Man’s mission in the world, if you’re a fan of the culture, if you’re a fan of this program, I hope you’ll consider making a tax-deductible donation at donate.burningman.org.
Thanks to all of you out there for listening.
Thanks to the people who made this episode possible:
- my story editor and sonic magician: Vav-Michael-Vav
- producers: Actiongrl, kbot, Lotus Position
- our Minister of Quality Control: DJ Toil
I’m Stuart Mangrum.
Thanks, Larry.
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