Building the Ultimate Safe House 289
Hugh Pickens writes "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornadoes and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war. Fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, has earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and is designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for 'bunkerlike' safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with 'radial engineering' wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure. Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, says it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some 'extreme' building techniques don't make financial sense. 'You get to a point of diminishing returns,' says Buck. 'You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.''
Illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
It is illegal in some jurisdictions to build fortified homes. Many of the techniques listed would fall under that category. This is for the protection of the police and safety workers of course.
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It's illegal, for financial reasons.
When you have a house made of prefabs, it means that every 50 years you have to tear it down and rebuild. During that time, the land can change hands, the zoning can change as well. Which means people stand to make a lot of money buying and selling.
Then there's the fact, that, if you build a house indended to have a long lifespan, maintenance will be lower, making it much more cheaper in the long run, in essence, for an individual, it would be a bad investment, for a fami
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It is illegal in some jurisdictions to build fortified homes. Many of the techniques listed would fall under that category. This is for the protection of the police and safety workers of course.
The police? - So you're saying that a drug dealer would be breaking the law if he fortified his home? - Yes, that will truly be a big problem as he's obviously a law-abiding citizen to begin with. Seriously?
It is the same stupid reasoning we see again and again: Let make it illegal so we can keep it out of the hands of the criminals because they really care about the law, being criminals to begin with... Doh!
Let people fortify their homes. Any fortification can be broken so if the police need to make a raid
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Screw them. The only reason they would be entering my house would be if they were committing an illegal act and they would have bigger problems. I shoot intruders on the spot.
Why should i make it easy for them to violate my rights?
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Naturally, sponsored by a republican [tulsabeacon.com], the same kind that are against government regulation
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, that's one stupid law.
Jeff Cooper (famous to some, infamous to others, "Huh?" to most) had an interesting take on home invasions. He believed that the only thing you really needed during a home invasion was time. Literally just a few seconds warning gives you time to react properly and save lives. He used to teach something along the lines of "Your home is going to be invaded through the front door by a murderous gang. Your family, including your toddler grandchildren, is spread about the house. You have two choices. First option - you have the finest, custom-built .45 ever conceived by the mind of man built by the finest 'smith in the world with cost as no object on your belt. Second option - you have a functional but generally piece of crap .32 somewhere in your pocket and ten seconds warning. Which do you choose?"
The obvious answer is to take the warning time. To that end, he had a very simple entry to his home. It was a long (about 30 feet), narrow courtyard with a heavy, cast-iron gate at the end. Visitors had to ring the bell. He would look through the peephole and if things seemed OK, step outside the door. If he didn't know you, it would be up to you to explain why you were there. If he wanted to let you in, the gate was unlocked by a lever back at the front door.
In short, if you wanted to home-invade that guy, you'd have to break down a heavy gate (providing warning) and traverse a hallway without cover (aka, a completely merciless killing zone) before you could even reach his front door.
I thought his solution was elegant and cheap. It required only a couple of adobe walls leading out from the door to his house, an iron arbor "ceiling" for the outdoor room (from which decorative plants hung), and a sturdy gate with a very simply unlocking mechanism that was, essentialy, just a doorknob that extended back 30 feet to the front door.
If I had a place in the country, I'd consider this a very reasonable way to build an entry. I like entry courtyards, anyway.
But the law you cite would (arguably, depending on circumstances) make such a design illegal.
Stupid, stupid law.
Re:Illegal (Score:4, Insightful)
And that leads us to another point. Why crack a fortified home, when an unfortified one is available? A lot of the rationale behind this sort of thing is that it makes your home look a lot less vulnerable than the home next door. Unless the bad guys have a reason to break into this particular home, they'll be greatly encouraged to just go elsewhere.
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A fortified home or a fortified illusion. Just a new exercise in marketing targeted at the gullible. They'll pay extra to live in an unsafe zone and the profits will pour in. Guess what happens when there is a major hurricane and those fortified properties get flattened, the developers declares bankruptcy and moves to the Bahamas and lives off that grossly inflated salary they earned while building those 'fortified illusions' and they'll be screaming about the taxes they have to pay for those free loaders
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Not really. One in front and one in back take care of the only two doors to the house.
Windows were designed with security in mind. I never knew what his garage door precautions were like.
Remember, though, this guy wasn't building a fortress to withstand a prolonged siege. He just wanted the obvious entry points, the doors, sufficiently well-designed so that home invaders would be forced to give him a few seconds warning.
It's not like he had bullet-proof windows, for example. In fact, there's one famous
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You would really trust the government with a key to your house?
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What about if some trusted third party, like Porter Industries, held the key in escrow?
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when your house is on fire, you want the fire department to be able to enter as quickly as possible. Instead of finding the key to your house somewhere at the station, among hundreds of others, an axe works nicely as a universal door opener.
When my house is made of steel and concrete, it's not on fire. Especially with sprinkler systems to drown carpet/drapes fires.
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Well then, thank god for the Knox Box so they can just get the key from right beside the door...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knox_Box [wikipedia.org]
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make entry a noisy event Re:Illegal (Score:2)
What happens when that master key gets out in the wild? It's bound to happen eventually...
From the fine wiki article:
Some building managers wire Knox Boxes into their burglar alarm systems so that opening the box trips the alarm, negating their use in facilitating clandestine entry.
Re: Illegal (Score:2)
My office building has fire department lock box next to the front door.
Easy entry without an axe.
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Funny)
Then they can think outside the box and use the glass windows as entry points. Statistically, the chances of them having to put out a fire in my home while I am away are 90,500,324,115,000 to 1 there is a far higher chance that I will be home when there is a fire and the front door will be wide open.
Got another impossible example? Like what if the Department of homeland security chased a band of terrorists into my home and they locked the door behind them and I am away at my vacation home in Fiji?
Ohh, what if a meteorite that contained a space based virus crashed into my home and CDC could not get in to contain it, thus it spread and killed off the human race while I was out to get ice cream at Ben and Jerrys!
dramatic design hype (Score:3)
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You don't need a nuclear bunker design to weather even a 180 mph hurricane. Less dramatic design techniques have been around a while.
I think they call them cellars...
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Cellars are a really bad idea in the event of flooding...
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Which gets back to why it is an exercise in diminishing returns; site selection becomes more important, then site fortification, then building fortification. Anything like this should likely be done in layers: no damage/impact from 20-year events, cosmetic damage and minor loss of functional use for portions of the building for 100-year events, and something adequate to provide shelter and comfort when prepared for 500-year events. Think Pentagon with the rings; outermost is sacrificial in this context.
Ba
Re:dramatic design hype (Score:5, Interesting)
We heated two rooms (kitchen and living room) with firewood and the fireplace. We abandoned the entire second floor of the house. We purchased several suitcases of water prior to the storm's arrival (can't run the well pump with the current setup - a liability I *will* resolve.) The pantry was stocked with canned goods (i.e. baked beans, etc) that could be eaten right out of the can. We have two extra propane tanks for the gas grill. We sacrificed our normal behavior during the crisis, and had zero expectation that "business as usual" would return until well after power was restored.
If you're going to build a "survivable" residence, it needs to have a small core that's extremely energy/resource efficient. Simply adding armor to the outside might be an easy sell from the builder's perspective, but it's only one piece of the survive-the-crisis puzzle. As evidenced by the problems in NYC right now, as soon as the storm passes, your supply lines become an even bigger issue.
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Why buy water? why not buy 5-6 5 gallon food grade clean buckets and fill them yourself, saves a lot of money and gives you far more water. go fancy and the the 7 gallon pails with a spigot at the bottom from your local beer brewing store. I would rather have the pails as I can get my water supply set from a faucet 1 hour before the world ends instead of having to fight my neighbors who are in panic mode at the store.
Also a kerosene heater is also safe to use inside with venting. better choice for th
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I think they call them cellars...
How do you put a whole house into a cellar?
Re:dramatic design hype (Score:4, Interesting)
like this [wikipedia.org]. Yeah, humans basically figured out this problem in the Stone Age.
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To be sure Seumas, you had the feckin' plans upside down, so you did.
Re:dramatic design hype (Score:4, Interesting)
> I think they call them cellars...
When the tornadoes came through Alabama on April 27th, 2011, I know of at least two cases where people died in nice, deep cellars. In once case, the storm that tracked through Phil Campbell, AL actually picked up a vehicle and dropped it on a family, killing everyone.
Unless you reinforce the "roof" (typically the first floor of the home) over the cellar, or take other steps to ensure that things can't fall in on you (and this includes debris from a catastrophic collapse of the house itself), a basement won't necessarily protect you from an F4 or F5 "monster" tornado.
Around here, most folks seem to prefer the separate buried shelters. They have to run in the rain and wind to get into it, but they prefer that to trusting an "interior room" or a basement.
Re:dramatic design hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Around here, most folks seem to prefer the separate buried shelters. They have to run in the rain and wind to get into it, but they prefer that to trusting an "interior room" or a basement.
Tunnels that connect these to your basement are not all that hard to add. You can then quickly and safely head to it from the house. Of course you still want another way out in case your house does totally collapse, so you are not trapped in the shelter.
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> The only perfect protection is to not be there in the first place.
Sure, but (of course) that's sometimes difficult to do in real life.
Here's what I learned that April: we had plenty of advanced warning that something really bad would happen, but no one could predict exactly *where* the tornadoes would hit. Tornadoes aren't like tropical storms (and believe me, I've had plenty of experience with those things, too!). You can't track them for days, watching the slow progress as they head toward land, cons
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Cellars fill with water.
Vaastu Temple withstands 150mph (Score:2, Funny)
there's a type of vedic architecture principles called "vaastu", the other word used is sthapatyaveda - it's thousands of years old. a temple built according to "vaastu" architecture principles has withstood tornados and wind speeds of 150mph. i believe golden mean ratio is used extensively, integrated into over *1,000* measurements of the building's dimensions and proportions.
the exact effect this sort of integrated mathematical design has on the weather is just astonishing. that california brush fire i
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think about it, though: these people attribute "desire" to the "weather", but i believe there's a much more rational explanation: the extensive use of golden mean ratio in the proportions of the building setting up resonance patterns in the wind as the brush fire approached, causing pockets of air surrounding the building, against which the general direction of the fire *literally* had no quotes choice quotes but to change direction. i think it will be the same thing with that temple in india - the one that withstood 150mph winds.
I'm still not buying that house, unless it also sharpens dull razor blades and keeps fruit fresh.
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think about it, though: these people attribute "desire" to the "weather", but i believe there's a much more rational explanation: the extensive use of golden mean ratio in the proportions of the building setting up resonance patterns in the wind as the brush fire approached, causing pockets of air surrounding the building, against which the general direction of the fire *literally* had no quotes choice quotes but to change direction. i think it will be the same thing with that temple in india - the one that withstood 150mph winds.
I'm still not buying that house, unless it also sharpens dull razor blades and keeps fruit fresh.
:) you can't: they're happy living in it, and are extremely unlikely to sell - ever. i believe you're thinking of pyramids, or perhaps voodoo magic. this is about mathematics creating standing waves in the wind that can actually turn it away. if you've seen "standing waves" on a storm wall, you'll know what this is about. now take that to 3 dimensions: it's the exact same principle.
sthapatyaveda is aslo about making a conscious choice to live a radically healthier lifestyle. it can be tough as hell to
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this is about mathematics creating standing waves in the wind that can actually turn it away.
You can't do that without transferring the momentum onto the object doing the "turning away". That's a simple law of conservation of momentum. You have a mass of air going in one direction and then you have the same mass of air going in a different direction. You have to exert force by something to achieve that, standing waves or not. And as per Newton's third law, the structure is still going to be stressed by the dynamic pressure, only in your case, the building will be forced into oscillations. Big win t
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Such western thinking.
Your fortified home needs land around it (Score:5, Insightful)
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The home may survive, but if it's beachfront, you may find the distance from your bunker to the waves is a lot less when you emerge after the hurricane.
yeah. i mention sthapatyaveda in another post, but the "rules" for sthapatyaveda include never putting a building in a valley, or under a cliff, or within 1 mile of any kind of large body of water. there are about 30 "rules" for choosing a site, and, when you look at them and actually think about them, they actually make a hell of a lot of sense. the one "don't pick a plot that's been abandoned by nature i.e. has no animals or birds on it" is just... well... we know that animals have more instinctive sens
Or... go old school (Score:5, Interesting)
Go old school and build a concrete dome [aidomes.com]. These are nothing new, very strong, and energy efficient.
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Re:Or... go old school (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Or... go old school (Score:5, Interesting)
You basically cannot overstate just how indestructible these things are. I visited one in Atlanta and the owner said that just a few months earlier an 18" wide tree had fallen over onto the house. This would have caused tremendous damage to any regular house, but this dome shrugged it off almost entirely, with the stump of a limb poking a 6" hole through the wall. There's that beach dome in Pensacola that survived repeated direct strikes of powerful hurricanes back in '04-'05 that just leveled every surrounding structure. The only damage it took was things like the main stairs washing away, which they were designed to do anyway. There's a story about a guy who bought a piece of land with a monolithic dome barn on it and hired a contractor to demolish it. Took the guy a solid week of whaling on it with a wrecking ball before it came down. There was a cheap knockoff version of a monolithic dome (no rebar) in Oklahoma that took a _direct_ hit by a tornado. Terribly damaged, but the structure is still intact. Lastly of course is the dome in Baghdad that served as a government office building. During the US invasion back in '03, they dropped a 5000 lb bomb on it. The bomb punched through and destroyed everything inside, but the building is still standing.
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Re:Or... go old school (Score:4, Interesting)
You could also contact Monolithic Domes in Italy, TX. They practice what they preach, using concrete and steel domes for their factory buildings. They took a direct hit from an F3 tornado. They had the employees pull their cars inside, and no one even had chipped paint. They've made real strides in recent years to make their buildings blend in more with the surrounding architectures. They don't have to look like a 60's hippy commune.
I really don't understand why everyone is effectively saying, "fortified homes kill puppies!!" You guys LIKE running in the middle of the night to a shelter? Or waking up to find that a post came through the wall and killed your teen-aged daughter? I've always thought people who built little crackerbox houses were idiots. I know of AT LEAST one town in Kansas that had everyone still alive living in shipping containers for over a year because a tornado scraped the town off the earth, and they are just now finishing up infrastructure repairs to Joplin, MO after the tornado strike that ate a hospital and gutted the city. Before anyone says, "Well, they probably came off better financially after all the aid came in", I can definitively say that's crap. What aid money is out there is stretched to the limit with all the natural disasters happening, so you may not get any. When big disasters happen, it can ruin an insurance company to the point that they close their doors, and then no one gets paid. Besides, how much money would it take to let someone kill your little boy? Or your wife? Or you? How much are these lives worth to you?
I grew up in Tornado Alley in NE Texas. Our home was 1800 square feet with laminated floor beams on a full, reinforced basement on a hilltop. We eventually moved, selling the home to my uncle and his family. It's still a fortress, and helping members of the family sleep well when the tornado sirens go off.
Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
'You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.''
Naturally, a bean-counter and an actual occupant might have different thoughts about that... :p
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This is what I am thinking a couple days ago watching the news reports of angry people in Staten Island complaining about the lack of assistance because their neighborhood looks like a war zone: why are you there? At least with Katrina I could see that a lot of the people who stayed didn't own a car, which also means they may not have money for a hotel room. But in the pictures of Staten Island I am seeing yachts piled up on porsches.
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They'll take.. (Score:3)
Re:They'll take.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I wouldn't hole up in anything with less than four exits.
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I toured a decommissioned Minuteman control silo at Whiteman AFB fifteen years ago. One of the things they showed us was the emergency-exit tunnel, provided in case the facility took a hit and the main elevator was knocked out. As it was described to us, it was a stump that ended in the surrounding dirt, with a shovel provided so the crew could dig their way out.
I'd expect the average civilianized silo to have at least one of those, and probably more than one.
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Find a good architect (Score:4, Informative)
Reinforced concrete easily beats wood-frame in strength, fire, and flood-induced mold-resistance. Find a specialist to use GFRP concrete reinforcement if you want it to last centuries. Insulate with foam for water resistance, or mineral wool if you can find a contractor for it. Look at composite or metal form deck roofing for concrete strength above your head, too. You probably want a commercial contractor if you're going all out. Find an architect that knows what they're doing. For windows, you'll want them with a minimal length in at least one dimension - short in width or height, to be secure in hurricane conditions. Even then, you'd need a specialty product if you want to resist a 2x4 flying edge-first into the window. And of course, you need high ground, a well, and a generator.
Re:Find a good architect (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, a well. Which is going to be contaminated in any serious flood.
I have a well over 120 feet deep that goes through a clap cap (well, I rent a home with...) but it's still under surface influence.
You will need a large water tank.
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Good point. You can pay extra to have a deep well drilled, and you can also look at integrating a rain-water harvesting system with a large storage tank.
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Brick houses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there any European-style brick houses in New England (or anywhere else) with extreme weather? (More extreme than Europe.) Are they robust enough?
Every house I've ever lived in has been built from two layers of brick, with either an air gap (older) or fibreglass (you call it mineral wool then?) or similar between, for insulation. I live in England, so we don't need shutters, but they're normal in some places -- generally for temperature control rather than protection. A tiled roof might not do very well in a hurricane. Some small changes (strong shutters, better-attached roof) and you're almost there...
TV reports of a house fire in Europe generally show a house with soot marks above some windows, and possibly a burnt and partially collapsed roof. They have to burn for a *long* time for walls to collapse. Flood damage means replacing all the ground-floor carpets and making sure the space under the house is dry, to avoid damp/mould. Wind damage usually means replacing a missing roof tile, but we don't get wind like America.
(For that matter, how are the big buildings in Manhattan? They're brick or concrete and presumably don't have shutters.)
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(Oh, and I didn't mention: my parent's brick house is 106 years old, one I rented in London was ~120, another ~80. As far as I know, the only maintenance necessary to the walls is to repoint the brickwork -- i.e. replace any cement that's crumbled from between the bricks. My parents did it when the house was about 100 years old, and it should be another 100 years before it needs doing again...)
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I misspoke - meant rockwool, not mineralwool, though it seems some consider the terms interchangeable. Rockwool is unaffected by moisture unlike fiberglass, and it also has higher heat resistance. I wouldn't place fiberglass in that gap due to the potential for moisture intrusion.
Brick is similar to concrete in its durability and fire-resistance, but reinforced concrete is much stronger than brick. Concrete also doesn't require any maintenance, unlike mortared brick/block. Brick also doesn't require for
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My language isn't accurate, I know very little about the subject, except that older houses in the UK usually don't have any insulation in the space, unless it was added later. The government will subsidise adding it in order to reduce energy use: http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Insulation/Cavity-wall-insulation [energysavingtrust.org.uk]
Fibreglass is probably the usual material for insulating ceilings and loft spaces (i.e. underneath the roof tiles).
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Note the full quote was "use GFRP concrete reinforcement if you want it to last centuries"
That is, use fiberglass reinforcement bars, not steel. Hence, no expanding accumulation of rust to crack apart your concrete.
Just buy an army surplus tank or armored carrier (Score:3)
Park it in the backyard, or in the front yard, if you want to annoy the neighbors. Ride out the calamity in there. If civilization is still around, you will survive when you crawl out. If not, you probably won't want to bother to stay around much longer anyway. As the summary suggests, you might just as well plan to build a new house. Or, how about moving to somewhere with a safer climate to begin with . . . ?
Oh, and make sure your tank has Reactive Armor.
Live forever or die trying (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, how about moving to somewhere with a safer climate to begin with ?
Geologically and climatologically safe places are almost always boring, empty and low-value.
Fertile soil means flood-plains, which means floods. (Hell even deserts flood every few decades.) Too flat and you can add tornadoes. Forests and parks means fire risk, trees falling in storms, etc. Good views of the sea means storms, up to and including hurricanes, along with coastal erosion. Good views inland usually means hills and mountains, which means landslides, probably earthquakes. Rivers and valleys means floods, landslides, and wild-fire funnelling. Then you've got ice storms if you're too far north, blackouts from too many air-conditioners if you are too far south, resulting in heat-deaths. (Northern hemisphere).
And, even if you pick well, you've only got a few decades of in-your-lifetime awareness of weather events to go on. A century or so if you make an effort to go into the records. That still leaves you fucked if you get a once-in-a-century (-or-three) event. Or if climate changes and makes your previously low risk site suddenly higher risk.
And that's just nature. Then you've got people. Home invasion, riots, arson, government falling, invasion, zombies...
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Only a century of weather? Huh?
OK, so I can't tell you average mean temperatures etc. going way back, but any sizeable storm or notable weather event (river that never freezes freezing due to really bad winter etc.) is recorded where I live going back at least until the 1600's, and before that, there are records containing reference to freak occurrences, so I know that volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes & tornadoes are quite rare here (ie. less than once per few hundred years, with the exception of the
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As the shouty coward says, I meant the understanding most people have about their local area from common experience and easily accessed non-specialist records.
Or to put it in a more suitably snarky way: Go on then, smart-ass, tell me. Did you actually do that research before you moved there?
Not everywhere is midwest USA where westerners have only known it for a hundred + years...
That's actually my point. The reason certain areas were settled was because they had deep harbours (tectonically active, prone to storms), rivers (major flooding), minerals/coal from mountains (tectonically active, plus
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And *my* point was that not everywhere is in America; I said mid-western USA since I'm guessing the east coast and even california etc. have records going back at least 200 years. But I live in Scotland. I know what the weather was like, in broad terms, 1000 years ago. There are battle accounts of a nearby battlefield between the Gaels and the Norse, proclaiming how it was extraordinarily cold for the time of year, as it was May and there was still a bitter frost.
Not everywhere is in the US, not everywhe
Location location location (Score:2)
If you have a choice of where you live, staying away from the coast, and not near an active seismic zone, and not next to a river can help.
(also some areas are less prone to tornados too.
I think if Obama is reelected there may be more missile silos up for sale too.
Grade school geography. (Score:2)
If you have a choice of where you live, staying away from the coast, and not near an active seismic zone, and not next to a river can help.
The big city and the well-paying job tends to found where where trade, transport and communication is easy and affordable.
The Erie Canal linked an ambitious and prosperous New York City to the Great Lakes and the Midwest. New Orleans had the Mississippi, the Missouri and Ohio to draw upon.
If your interests lie in grain and cattle and you will likely be thinking about settling the Great Plains. The miner heads for the mountains. The fisherman for open water.
Makes you feel all warm and safe... (Score:3)
... and then you catch a deadly tropical virus off one of the cashiers at Costco and die in agony as your insides turn to liquid.
Tropical Diseases? (Score:4, Interesting)
When you say that, I immediately think of Dengue fever. [wikipedia.org] It's a hemorrhagic fever with four serotypes: fun for the whole family. Unlike most diseases where catching one variant grants immunity to the others, with dengue you end up with *less* protection from the other variants. I like to think of it as "Ebola Lite", except by the time you've had it a couple times you may not appreciate the distinction.
You can get worse things without having to make the trip to the tropics: MRSA [wikipedia.org] will make your insides become your outsides at a shockingly rapid pace, and tends to cause permanent scarring in survivors. It's commonly found in hospitals! Fun fact: About half the US states do not require hospitals to report statistics on Hospital-Acquired Infections. [hospitalinfection.org]
I've had both (within the last year or so -- may you live in interesting times). MRSA is worse, and lots closer to home. For all the hue and cry about salmonella, only about 30 people die per year from it. In 2005, over eighteen thousand people died [webmd.com] from MRSA -- it has a greater annual death toll than AIDS.
If I had to pick which infection to get again, I'd probably go with "Ebola Lite". That should tell you something.
The question of why MRSA gets less press than other diseases is left as an exercise to the reader. Support legislation on hospital infection statistics!
My neighbor built homes like this in Florida... (Score:3, Informative)
He told me how they used reinforced concrete (iirc, rebar laced/laden), & the wildest part that got me, was they didn't use bolts to anchor the wall frames, but rather some sort of straps (personally, I'd have used BOTH, but money talk$).
(This was done in the interests of withstanding tropical storms...)
* Operating from memory on this, but that's what I recall from the conversation...
What "blows my mind", is this: I've been to Europe & saw castles that have stood for 2-3 thousand years, & touched their mortar. Guess what? It's STILL solid as the day it cured & dried... tells me a lot, right there - they didn't "skimp" on using the right amount of lime in it (vs. overdoing the sand part to save a buck).
The homes I saw in Poland were amazing too - they aren't little "wooden toothpick boxes", but instead, built almost SOLELY of cinder blocks filled with stones & concrete - then, they are overlaid with foam insuluation from the outside ontop of that, then a coating of some sort of veneer (cement type).
I walked around and unlike homes in the U.S., where the floors 'shudder' when I walk (I weigh ~ 220 lbs)? These homes were SOLID AS A ROCK - no perceptible movement @ all, even in the UPPER floors!
They are just built, better... better than most homes I've seen in the USA, including mine.
APK
P.S.=> He's been a "journeyman" carpenter in the unions for 18++ yrs. now...
... apk
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Even brick homes in the US tend to be wooden framed and just faced in brick. The house I grew up in in the UK was brick all through even on the interior walls and the exterior walls were two layers of brick with a cavity. American mentality seems to be "quick, cheap and don't worry about 50 years down the road".
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Bolts concentrate stress in the base plate; straps distribute the stresses and more directly transfer load to bearing surfaces for uplift. When you do both, you run the risk of the base/sill plate failing before the straps can take the load. The house wouldn't collapse, but it might need major repairs.
Brick (Score:5, Insightful)
Using brick instead of wood may help some. Nothing high tech about that.
Re:Brick (Score:5, Funny)
I know some pigs that recommend brick over wood or straw in their ability to withstand winds gusts.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I grew up in an area where hurricanes are simply known as winter. All the houses are made of brick and seldom suffer damage. The American fetish with expensive stick houses is really amazing.
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The American fetish with expensive stick houses is really amazing.
Indeed, and when I drive around in hurricane-prone Florida, I swear their most protective coating for hurricanes is that thin layer they call insurance.
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Bricks are shit for earthquake resistance. I don't believe it's legal to build with brick in some earthquake-prone areas now.
Onestep Wall (Score:3)
I used to work for a startup company that created an amazing new block design, lays up like standard masonry and has the beauty of masonry.
http://onestepbuildingsystem.com/what-is-onestep.html [onestepbui...system.com]
Has an integrated cavity that is filled with concrete and rebar, so is ridiculously strong. And the insulation seals it against water penetration (not as well as the original design which had more internal plastic, but in the water penetration testing it stood up to hurricane force driven water without leakage.)
Also has great sound insulation, has thermal mass to the inside which drops heating and cooling costs significantly, and maintenance is fairly inexpensive.
Not sure what choice you'd use for windows, I recall seeing some that were quite amazing 10 years ago, when I last looked, but I'm sure the market has devised some even cooler stuff since.
Three little pigs and a wolf (Score:2)
This really reminds me of the three little pigs and who's house survived the huffs and puffs of the wolf. I am pretty sure his house was not built out of wood. He was probably also the rich pig in the family ;)
The problem with many homes is poor location, poor choice of construction material and poor choice of architecture. We need to respect the potential fury of Mother Nature when she decides its time to remind everyone of her presence, and build accordingly.
The first thing you do is not build your house
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Re your last sentence, the problem is not that insurance is regulated, it's the reverse. If people couldn't get insurance for areas that are guaranteed to flood or get blown over regularly, they might think twice about living there. Instead, the government compels insurers to cover them anyway.
Oh, that is crazy. I was hoping for something in terms of the opposite. Buildings should be receive a disaster risk rating, such that people can make informed decisions and accept whatever penalty comes with it. Imagine the rating goes from A-F, with A being lowest risk rating. If something happens there then you get an increased rate of protection, if you get get F then you should be paying a tax surcharge as a way of compensating the government for when the finally have to bail you out.
cheaper to keep her (Score:2)
The most effective and cost-effective thing you can do to protect yourself in the case of some disaster (natural or man-made), is to be a useful and well-regarded member of your community, your neighborhood, your block and to look out for the people around you.
You might lay out hundreds of thousands on the sturdiest house possible and get run over by a beer truck on your way to the corner store. Or maybe no disaster ever occurs and you've spent all that money needlessly.
But being an integral part of a comm
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Good point. Hard to keep up a 24 x 7 guard around your perfect redoubt all by yourself.
Hard to chop up a 4 foot wide tree all by yourself.
Hard to have every skill and trade needed all by yourself.
Society. There is a reason for it.
Round house: been done (Score:2)
A circular house that transfers load to a central pillar has been done:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house [wikipedia.org]
It's pretty awesome, but you pretty much have to go custom for all of your furniture, counters, bathroom appliances, etc.
yeah (Score:2)
You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.
Because people who are rich enough to own homes like that wouldn't ever have anything inside that is as valuable as the house, and maybe more (paintings, artwork, stuff like that).
Not to mention emotional values.
Domes are the way to go (Score:2)
A square house made of sticks does not stand up to high winds. For that you need a concrete dome [monolithic.com] made by the folks at Monolithic.
pipe dream (Score:2)
However, the pampered rich will not buy them.
If you entertain, you cannot have a long entryway to repel home invaders.
If you want a view of the water or mountains or whatever, you need to carve holes in the sturdy walls in put in windows that _will_ fail when the wind gets strong enough. And most emergency preparedness is not a one-time thing. It is the maintenance of keeping batteries charged and an emergency food supply up-to-date an
Then start using stone to build houses (Score:3)
Cheaper solutions are available... (Score:2)
You don't need to go nuts to get a home that'll survive massive destruction.
Wood-framed homes are plenty strong to survive massive destruction. The failures happen where the various frame pieces join together, hence the Hurriquake nail designed just for this purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HurriQuake [wikipedia.org]
Secondly, I've seen the aftermath, and heard from residents, and you get a pretty clear map of what works and what doesn't... The houses destroyed are the ones that didn't have steel shutters... all t
It doesn't have to be expensive (Score:2)
It doesn't have to be expensive to build a house than can withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, etc. Nor does it have to be very large. Our family's home cost only $7K to build and is a comfortable 252 sq-ft for five people. We built it in two months by ourselves - just about anybody could do it.
As an added bonus, our house's 100,000 lbs of masonry (stone, brick and concrete) stores heat very well so the house is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Even without auxiliary heat the house
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Don't forget to put a little aside to replace your wife and/or kids who were killed in the collapsing structure. And get some reincarnation insurance as well.
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The thing is, these buildings are being constructed for people who utterly rely on society - the waiters, the banks, the nanny, the tailor, the doctors. Sure, they'll last 30 days, but have they remembered to pack a big first aid kit and learned some medical basics? Do they know how to darn socks? Fix boots? Forage for and preserve food? Fix a car engine?
This is a classic example of a man who needs fish and buys a freezer instead of a net.