Drive west from Chihuahua City for three hours. The road narrows. The landscape turns into scrubland and low desert brush. Then the pavement ends. The last seven kilometers are gravel — during the rainy season, trucks get stuck.
This is the site of a copper mine expansion in northern Mexico. The first time the mine manager stood here, on a dried-up riverbed, he said: three months from now, six hundred people need to live here.
On day one, the site had a generator and a tent. The first job was leveling — the old riverbed had nearly two meters of elevation difference across the camp area. A local bulldozer worked for a full week just to get the ground flat.
The foundation team went with strip concrete footings with embedded steel plates — not a full slab that would require two weeks of curing. The work was done in sections: pour a section, erect units on it immediately, move to the next. That's how you compress the schedule. The tolerance was tight — flat-pack containers connect through bolt holes, and if the foundation is off by more than five millimeters, the panels won't align.
The advantage of flat-pack design is that everything ships flat. Walls, floors, and roofs arrive as individual panels stacked like unopened books. A single 40-foot container can carry 800 square meters of floor area — the same truckload that would carry four or five assembled containers carries the equivalent of 168 flat-pack units in panel form.
On-site assembly uses a 25-ton crane and two workers. Set the floor panel down. Stand the wall panels up around the edges. Bolt the corners together. Put the roof panel on top. Twenty minutes per unit.
The technical supervisor was Chinese, working through a translator, leading a crew of twenty local workers. The first day they completed only six units — everyone was still learning the sequence, and the crane operator had never handled flat-pack panels before. By day three, they were up to ten units per day.
Chihuahua's climate is different from Zacatecas. The altitude is lower — around 1,500 meters — but it's much drier. Daytime temperatures hit 40°C. The wind is the real challenge: during the dry season, dust storms can reduce visibility to a few meters.
The exterior panels were finished with PVDF fluorocarbon coating. Standard polyester paint would start to chalk and fade within a year or two under the abrasive, sand-laden wind. PVDF shows almost no visible change.
The roof panels were designed with a 30-centimeter overhang. Not for looks — in desert regions, when it rains, it pours. Without an overhang, rainwater runs directly down the wall panels, and over time the sealant joints deteriorate. The overhang keeps the walls dry.
Once all units were in place, the interior work began. Plumbing, electrical, air conditioning, bathroom fixtures, flooring.
All 168 units needed individual utility connections. The pipes and cables run through the underfloor plenum — the units sit on 10-centimeter steel legs, creating a crawl space underneath. All utilities route through this gap, keeping interior space clean and making maintenance accessible without breaking walls.
The bathhouse has 40 shower heads, split between male and female areas. The laundry room has 10 industrial washing machines — household machines don't survive the mineral dust that gets into miners' clothing. The kitchen meets commercial standards: stainless steel workstations, walk-in cold storage, exhaust hood, capable of serving 200 people per meal.
Air conditioning test. Water heater test. Fire suppression test. Every door lock, window seal, and power outlet gets checked. The mine's team starts moving in while the last items are being finished.
On day 70, the final batch of furniture arrives. Six hundred beds, lockers, desks, chairs — all in place.
The mine's operations manager said something afterward that stuck with the sales team: from the day he stood on that dry riverbed to the day the first workers moved in — seventy days. He had told himself to expect at least four months.
Chihuahua is one of Mexico's largest copper-producing states, with annual output approaching 600,000 tons. This camp serves just one mine's expansion. The underground equipment installation and shaft development would take several more months, but the camp was ready in seventy days. When the workers arrived, there was hot food, running showers, air-conditioned rooms. For people who work underground, that's already better than they expected.
| Capacity | 600 workers |
| Units | 168 flat-pack container units |
| Build time | 70 days incl. manufacturing |
| Design wind load | 120 km/h |
| Wall insulation | 75mm rock wool with PVDF coating |
| Windows | Thermal-break aluminum frame, double-glazed |
9States specializes in modular camp solutions for global mining, energy, and infrastructure projects. Visit our website: www.9prefabhouse.com
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