DIYbanter - View Single Post - Hurricane-proof House

wrote:
Nehmo wrote:

How should this house be built and what should it have?

There's a big clue whenever you see news shots of the flooded city. What
structures are still standing, almost completely untouched?

The big apartment buildings.

And big office buildings.

And big hospitals.

And big hotels.

And big police stations are also all standing.

Just build multistory buildings, and put all essential building
utilities on the second floor or higher. Let the bottom floor have only
easily repaired interiors and utilities. Connect the second floors
of the buildings using a system of walkways just like in Minneapolis.

1970s style megastructures. Yeehah!

But really, your idea of putting essential building utilities on the
above the water line in floods is one I had before ( thread titled
"why don't they" on alt.architecture.

I suggested it for certain buildings that are of importance during
catastrophes - hospitals in particular. They are often full of people
who are in various states of disability who would have difficulty
evacuating or may not survive evacuation. Furthermore, hospitals should
be up and running during natural disasters and other catastrophes in
order to be used by those suffering injury during the natural disaster.

In retrospect, it would be a good idea, though not as crucial, for fire
stations and police stations to have the same hurricane resistance and
auxiliary power systems as the hospitals. That way first responders can
better do their jobs.

But doing it for every apartment building? Very excessive. Unless the
people who choose to live in apartment buildings want it and the people
leasing apartments can sell it.

You could even build the walkways open air, using the wrought iron
balcony style popular for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This would make
the city a fun place to visit.

Essentially this is the "house on stilts" idea but on a big enough scale
you could house a population of 500,000 in a densely populated area.

I shudder to think of the poor old woman stuck on the 17th floor,
surrounded by gangs of roaming youths who are ready to break in at any
moment.

This is what happens when you ignore peoples' desires for open space and
the privacy of private homes and cram them into giant megastructures
where the identity of their home is reduced to a mere number on a door.

Just go over to Yahoo and do a search for "Housing Projects, Chicago" -
you'll see what I mean.

For car storage some buildings would use the lower 3 or 4 stories for
car parks. Again, visit Minneapolis to see this sort of structure.
You'd need fewer cars since this would be a densely populated area with
lots of people able to walk to work.

Car storage?

People use their cars.

And Katrina showed us just how vital cars are to the evacuation of
cities. Simply put, if you were in New Orleans and could get a car out,
you were MUCH better off than you would have been if you were one of the
thousands who didn't have a car or a spot in someone else's car.

Access to transportation was really the issue in New Orleans; not
directly socio-economics or race. The rich new urbanist yuppie lawyer
who refused to drive on principal was stuck in New Orleans. (He was
interviewed on NPR) The cabbie who recently arrived from Pakistan and
works 18 hours a day 6 days a week so his family can live at the poverty
level could use his cab to get out of the city. (I saw him driving down
the road in Houston right after I heard the first guy's interview on the
radio).

This is the future.

No it's not.

Of course, this doesn't fit in with the real estate agent / developer
scenaria where every American is isolated on his own lot with 2 acres of
grass to mow every weekend. That's going to prove economically
non-viable when fuel prices rise, anyway.

Bull****. And I know what you're saying is bull**** because if you
visit France, or Spain, or Germany, you'll see people living in private
suburban houses and driving cars to and from work. Meanwhile they
snicker when America goes into crisis over $3 a gallon prices at the
pump, because that's what they've been paying all along. In fact, many
Europeans pay significantly more than that for gas, and it hasn't
dampened their desire for comfortable, private, individual houses.

Their entire nation of Holland is like the city of New Orleans - below
sea level and prone to very nasty storms and floods. It's also a nation
with all of the high fuel prices and gas taxes as the rest of Europe.
But the Dutch haven't abandoned private houses and cars - they've
adapted them.