CONNECTED COMPACT LIVING

What if you could buy your house or apartment straight from the assembly line and have it ready when you arrive?

OVER THE PAST DECADE, tiny homes and compact living has become popular as cities become increasingly crowded and more people want the convenience of owning a home with the flexibility of travelling. Kasita is a step up from these “traditional” tiny homes. After living in a 3m² dumpster for a year to experiment with the limits of human habitation, company CEO Jeff Wilson was left with an incredible experience and a new outlook. He then designed Kasita as an ultra-stylish yet practical home with a small footprint.

The units are rectangular and can slot into almost any space or be adopted into mass housing developments like complex blocks or government housing. They’re stackable, thus allowing multiple units to be incorporated into areas with limited development potential. Another plus is practicality for use as an accessory dwelling: it can easily become a small guest house or granny flat to substitute income, or an extra space for visiting family and friends.

Kastita’s almost modular design allows for a simple aesthetic with enough space for extras. Walk in the front door and the bathroom, fitted with a shower, basin and toilet, is directly to your right. A little way down the hall is the kitchen with a sunken living room cum bedroom just beyond it, and a bright windowed area is located at the rear.

This tiny dwelling comes with all of the necessities and luxuries of a modern home: a washer/dryer laundry combo, a single unit refrigerator and freezer, a microwave oven, an induction plate and an aircon with a heat pump.

The company hopes its housing concept will aid the USA and the world in fighting housing crises and has already started taking unit reservations. PM

n a chilly winter afternoon, five men stand in a circle outside a strip mall, their lips pursed and brows tight with concentration. The group includes a police officer from Monroe, Louisiana; another from Manatee County, Florida, wearing a hunter’s orange stocking cap; and an eager young member of the Arlington, Virginia, fire department in his darkgreen fireman’s jumpsuit. The men are talking deliberately, with long pauses, as they think through how to deal with the nasty problem at hand: a hundred metres away, in the strip mall, they have just discovered a hotel room filled with explosive material.

Inside the room at the Rocket City Hotel, the bed frame has been thrown up against the wall. A piece of brown parchment paper covered with chemical equations is taped up next to it. A single light is on, in the bathroom, illuminating a beaker on a hot plate. There are improvised detonators and pipe bombs all over the room.

“You said the bathtub was filled with some kind of powder?” an FBI special agent asks Justin Scott, the Arlington firefighter, who is wearing a baseball cap with his jumpsuit. Scott has just returned from a reconnaissance mission into the room, where he found syringes, a box of baking soda, and a basin full of citric acid.

“The powder is drying on a big sheet in the bathroom,” Scott says. “What colour is it?” “Whitish-grey.” The Rocket City Hotel is not a real hotel. The strip mall was built by the FBI in 2004 and sits on the campus of its Hazardous Devices School (HDS), part of the Redstone Arsenal, a 154-million m2 US Army facility in Huntsville that’s also home to the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency, NASA’S Marshall Space Flight Centre and the Army’s Aviation and Missile Command. As you walk around the campus, what sound like large explosions ring out every few hours from distant corners.

The men standing in a circle are trainees, learning how to approach, identify, defuse and generally keep humans safe from explosive materials. The strip mall also contains a car repair workshop and a diner and is one of twelve villages built by HDS to simulate real-world situations. There’s an airport baggage carousel, a church, and a movie theatre. (The marquee advertises The Hurt Locker, the 2008 film about a bomb-disposal team in Iraq that won six Academy Awards including best picture.) At another location, a group of students is figuring out how to remove a suicide vest attached to a mannequin’s body.

At the motel, the trainees stand around a white pick-up that carries their equipment – bomb suits, X-ray machines, water cannons, and a robot they’ve already rolled off the back. They consider the new information from Scott’s reconnaissance: most explosive powders are white or grey, except TNT, which is yellowish. Not much to go on.

As recently as 2014, improvised explosive devices caused 42 627 casualties worldwide. In one six-month period in 2013, there were 172 IEDS reported in the United States alone. Many of these devices are defused without incident, usually by people like the bomb techs in Huntsville, young law enforcement officers drawn to the profession by the promise of doing something more interesting than writing traffic tickets. Every one of these techs – about thirty-one hundred spread across 466 squads – trains here at Huntsville.

“Today is a homemade explosive lab, tomorrow morning’s gonna be a suicide bomber, and tomorrow afternoon will be a car bomb,” says Ed Marshman, a burly former FBI agent with a white goatee who is now an HDS instructor. “Thursday will be a WMD.”

Bomb makers constantly adapt and change their methods over time as new technologies present new ways to cause destruction and bomb technicians are expected to know everything, DC electricity, robot operation, how to build and countercharge a bomb themselves. Students at HDS start their work in the classroom. In the first room I visited there was a row of mannequins wearing bomb suits from the 1960s to today. At one end of the display a large floor chart showed the relative danger of standing over an explosion, a 200 g block of TNT without fragmentation, at different distances: a metre and a half away, a bomb tech might suffer hearing loss; closer than that, there’s a high chance of severe lung damage; any closer,

your car will be thoroughly searched by a security officer who spends several minutes digging through your trunk before circumnavigating the vehicle, inspecting the undercarriage with a mirror. Once you’ve gone inside the building, you pass through a metal detector and then hand over your phone, which has to be checked into a locker.

TEDAC is in the process of moving its operations from its old home at the FBI Crime Lab in Quantico to this new $132 million facility. Most of TEDAC, but not all, is now in Huntsville, where it has one operational building and two more on the way.

In spite of the construction, the halls inside always seem to have been recently swept. (In one suspiciously clean lab room, an employee tells me it isn’t usually so neat, but they had been working on something they couldn’t talk to me about.) The corridors are dotted with clocks showing the current time in Quantico, Baghdad and Kabul. I saw four or five signs that read “Do not discuss classified info in hallways” on the walls on my limited tour.

The office of Corey Scott, like most of the rooms here, is littered with cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes, each of them sealed with multiple layers of bright-yellow evidence tape. Any time an analyst at TEDAC examines a document or piece of evidence from any case, he puts it back in its box, adds a layer of yellow tape, and signs his initials to record the chain of custody. One room I visited contained a dozen boxes labelled “Car Search” and “Post-blast” and “104 Elmora” – the address of a restaurant run by the family of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of placing bombs in Elizabeth and Seaside Park, New Jersey; and New York City in September 2016.

Scott is an analyst in the Toolmarks department. When an exploded IED is recovered, or when one is captured early and defused, Toolmarks is typically its final stop at the FBI. (See right.) Biometrics – fingerprints and DNA – determines the who. Chemical Analysis tells the FBI the what. Toolmarks is the how.

“Toolmarks is the final resting place,” Scott says. “It’s basically, we don’t know what else can be done with it, so send it to Toolmarks.”

Wearing rectangular glasses and a blue gingham shirt and slacks, Scott sits down at a comparison microscope. He has brown hair and is of average height. He could pass for an accountant. “I feel like a dentist a lot of the time,” he says. He lines up pieces from two different explosive devices next to each other, revealing that they have nearly identical markings. They may have been made by the same person, or at least with the same blade or hammer. “We can link devices that come from two different countries back to the same manufacturer,” he says.

Bomb remnants can spend years at TEDAC, with the goal of giving law enforcement everything they need to find and prosecute individual bomb makers anywhere in the world. The first device that ever arrived at TEDAC, back in 2003, was an Iraqi bomb attached to a doorbell. At the height of the insurgency, the facility received as many as five hundred boxes a day filled with evidence, some from Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It has now examined more than 105 000 devices, most of which are stored in a warehouse in Redstone. hat’s the diaper,” Justin Scott says, as the other officers attach a layer of Kevlar around his groin. He’s getting ready to enter the motel room. Modern bomb suits weigh eighty pounds and come with an exoskeleton spine to protect against blasts that send bomb techs flying. It takes two of the other trainees to lift the chest protector up and over Scott’s head.

It’s gotten colder and a light rain falls, but Scott is sweating even before he begins walking the hundred yards to the motel. A technician can typically last twenty minutes in a bomb suit before exhaustion begins to impair his decision-making skills. Before that time is up, Scott will have to unplug the hot plate and dispose of the improvised detonators, a task with no high-tech solution.

“What should every bomb tech have in his possession?” Marshman, the HDS instructor, says before Scott begins his long walk.

“One of those things old ladies use to pick things up off the ground?” says the officer from Louisiana.

“Bingo. If that improvised det goes off in your hands, what’s gonna happen? You’re Captain Stumpy,” Marshman says, picking

When a device arrives at the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Centre, it moves through three different types of examination based on what law enforcement or intelligence agencies need to know most quickly. “They tell us what they want, and we start pushing evidence out immediately,” Mark Whitworth, who runs TEDAC’S forensics unit, says. Here’s how it works. Department:

up a blue trash grabber. “If it goes off at the end of this, you’ve just got to clean your bomb suit.”

Unfortunately, there are some occasions when something as simple as a trash grabber is the best technology a bomb tech can use. After a large explosion, civilians will immediately turn and run, often dropping whatever they’ve got in their hands: purses, water bottles, plastic bags, backpacks.

“Go back and look at the pictures,” says Hamann, of the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “There are backpacks everywhere, and somebody’s got to clear every one of them.” There’s no time to deploy a robot when another bomb could go off at any second. Bomb-sniffing dogs are worthless when an entire scene is covered in explosive debris.

Hamann’s face morphs into a look of extreme distaste. “At a certain point,” he says, “it’s cut open and look.” he job of a TEDAC examiner is less immediately exhilarating than a bomb tech’s – there’s good reason The Hurt Locker won best picture, while The Kingdom (2007), based on a TEDAC investigation, is largely unmemorable. TEDAC is a place for people who would rather engage in focused study in quiet lab rooms than walk downrange, hearts pounding, in bomb suits. And yet no job related to homemade explosives is entirely safe. In another room, Colin Pollard, a chemist who works in the TEDAC Improvised Explosives Detection and Synthesis Centre (TIEDS), stands next to a fume hood in a lab filled with beakers, mixing the elements necessary to make a compound called silver fulminate. “It’s a very angry explosive. I’m trying to make it without it bursting in flames,” he says, cheerily.

Pollard came to TIEDS from Los Alamos and Sandia, two of the US government’s most elite laboratories, where safety regulations were much stricter. TIEDS can set off an explosive with just a few hours’ notice to clear the airspace above the test site. They don’t want to accidentally pick off a small aircraft. As Pollard says, “We have the capability to make any explosive known to man here.”

Once he’s done mixing, Pollard scoops out a pinch of silver fulminate, a white powder, puts it on a plate, and sculpts it into a neat pile. He hands me a pair of earphones, then smacks it with a hammer while I wince. There is a loud pop. This is an impact test, he says, just one of the many kinds of exams the chemists at TIEDS conduct on dangerous materials, along with heat, friction and electrostatic energy. On the demolition range, they use high-speed cameras to determine the size and velocity of any of the fragments that fly off in different directions during an explosion, and pressure gauges to determine the force of the explosion’s shock waves. In the lab, one of Pollard’s colleagues pulls up a video clip from a recent test of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, an especially explosive mixture. The clip shows three distinct shock waves radiating across the screen in the first instants after the explosion, before the dirt on the ground even begins to kick up.

Of course, most terrorists don’t use laboratory-grade equipment