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Giant Lab Replicates Category 3 Hurricanes
Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that a new $40 million research center built by the Institute for Business & Home Safety in Richburg, SC features a massive test chamber as tall as a six-story building that can hold nine 2,300-square-foot homes on a turntable where they can be subjected to tornado-strength winds generated by 105 giant fans to simulate a Category 3 hurricane. The goal is to improve building codes and maintenance practices in disaster-prone regions even though each large hurricane simulation costs about $100,000. The new IBHS lab will be the first to replicate hurricanes with winds channeling water through homes and ripping off roofs, doors and windows. The new facility will give insurers the ability to carefully videotape what happens as powerful winds blow over structures instead of relying on wind data from universities or computer simulations. The center will also be used to test commercial buildings, agriculture structures, tractor-trailers, wind turbines, and airplanes."
Category 3 hurricane is Winds (1 min sustained winds): 111-130 mph
Category F2 tornado is Significant Tornado: 112 - 157 mph
The hurricane scale goes higher - a level F3 tornado (158 - 206 mph) would be a category 5 hurricane (>155 mph) and there's no match for a F4 or F5 tornado. And thank you very much for that...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
we just had a tornado in my part of NYC last month and only the trees fell down. all the homes are made of brick and concrete and all survived intact even though the tornado passed right over us.
To clarify, the smallest hurricanes have a larger geographical footprint than the largest tornadoes. A hurricane cannot form in a small area, and a tornado cannot be that large; the difference is in intensity. Tornadoes have much faster winds. Despite this, hurricanes are a larger source of damage.
In fact, the largest losses to insurance due to tornadoes+hail+wind in a given storm is just over $2bn, which is a big yawn compared to a large hurricane loss. It wouldn't make the top 20. Average loss per year for insurers due to hurricanes in the US has been higher than that, in the last 15 years or so. (And insurers are better at not paying claims for hurricanes, since "storm surge" is excluded due to it being flood.)
I'm a concientious
Well, yeah, once something is happening, the odds of it happening are pretty high. Anyways, I'm not try to belittle tornadoes, I actually find them far more scary than a hurricane, because with a hurricane we have ample warning to get out of the way.
But for your average home in kansas or some other tornado prone state, the overall chance of that house being hit by a tornado in its lifetime are less than the odds of a house in florida to be impacted by a hurricane in its lifetime. That combined with the fact that designing to protect against hurricane force winds is a good bit easier than designing against tornado force winds has led to our society in general to decide that for most of our buildings, the costs of tornado proofing are not worth it.
Better to send the people underground or wherever is safe, and just let the tornado have its way with the buildings. Mother Nature wins that fight by default, we don't even try to step into the ring.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I'd suspect that it is a mixture of things. Obviously, insurers want to refine their models so that absolutely everyone is paying their exact actuarial cost + profit; but they also have an interest in the safety of their clients in less severe circumstances. If there are cheap; but not necessarily obvious, things that can be done to decrease costs in more minor circumstances, it is mutually beneficial for insurance companies to offer an incentive of part of their expected savings to their clients. The insurance company makes money; because they don't pass on all the savings brought about by the modification. The customer wins because they get some of the savings and they might avoid the hassle of having their house damaged(even with 100% insurance cover, major water damage/destruction is a huge pain in the ass).
For any class of insurance where there is a continuum of events with various degrees of badness and avoidability, insurers are unlikely to lose much business by assisting their clients in being safer(ie: getting and using a gym membership will make me healthier; but I can't drop my health insurance because if I get cancer, I'd be totally fucked). However, they can often save money, by reducing claims paid for more minor issues, by assisting their clients with those more minor risks.
In this case, for example, most people really can't afford to lose their house and most of the stuff inside it. It would just be catastrophic. So, unless they are very poor, or live in a flood/fire zone where some federal "emergency" welfare-for-the-wealthy program rebuilds million+ houses each time they get wiped out, they will be carrying insurance on their homes. If there are simple things that can be done to make homes less vulnerable to common events(ie. low category storms, fires caused by lousy wiring) it is very much in the insurer's interest to encourage policyholders to make changes that ameliorate those risks, while still keeping them on the policy rolls with terrifying predictions of category 5 storms and catastrophic house fires.
If it turns out, for example, that(as in TFA's video) a building becomes much more vulnerable once its door blows open, that suggests a variety of retrofits in the "few hundred in materials and labor" category that could easily save tens of thousands in the event of a modest storm. Insurers would love to know about stuff like that, so they can offer you some percentage of their expected savings to have that done. Exactly the same way that health insurers commonly subsidize gym memberships and healthy eating tips and stuff. They know that you aren't leaving; because that 500k cancer could hit at any time; but they know that both of you will be better off if your fat ass doesn't end up with type II diabetes.
Correct. When you look at a wood structure failing (like in the video), you do not see wood being ripped apart or anything like that. What you see is that big structures are separated from each other. The structures remain intact (at least until they fly into something else). The problem is how the structures are fastened to each other (ie wall to floor and roof). Strapping the roof to the walls with metal instead of just using nails makes a big difference.