I’ve been inspired by the work of the great people who’ve been putting together Disaster Relief Trials events for a while now, but I never quite manage to get involved. I decided last year that I would try hard to participate in some way this year.

In the fall of last year I started converting one of my mountain bikes in to a utility bike, and have been working at it all winter so that I could not only start using my bike to get groceries and run errands, but I also have set it up so that I can haul two five gallon buckets of water and a lot of other stuff, hopefully at least up to 100 pounds, as is required to enter the “cargo hauling category”.

Here’s where my bike is now:

I have a few more tweaks to perform, but it’s basically ready, and now I just need to start riding with increasing amounts of weight on to get used to hauling more than a moderate load of groceries.

And now it seems that I may be able to incorporate some social media and VOST in to the DRT 2015 event.

Emma Stocker who’s leading the Portland DRT 2015 event approached Cory Grogan (Oregon Office of Emergency Management Public Information Officer) and I with the possibility of getting our newly formed Oregon VOST team involved in the event this year. We’re beginning discussions and not sure how we’ll use the team besides message support and amplification, but I’m very excited to see how VOST can help with this event. Mapping? Damage Assessment? If you have ideas let me know.

Here are some Disaster Relief Trials links and resources (more soon):

Disaster Relief Trials facebook page

Cargo bikes reach new heights at ‘Disaster Relief Trials’

Disaster Relief Trials Video

another Disaster Relief Trials Video

More blog posts and videos on the BikePortland blog