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Floating Houses Designed For Low-Lying Countries
Zothecula writes "Venice may soon be sharing its 'Floating City' moniker thanks to a research project developing 'amphibian houses' that are designed to float in the event of a flood. The FLOATEC project sees the primary market for the houses as the Netherlands, whose low-lying land makes it particularly susceptible to the effects of rising sea levels. Such housing technology could also allow small island-states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans that are at the risk of disappearing in the next 100 years to maintain their claim to statehood through the use of artificial, floating structures."
Floating houses for low-lying countries?!?
Do they know something I don't?
Signed,
Suspicious, from the Netherlands
Really? What does "Claim to Statehood" actually mean to you when your house is now floating in the middle of Nowhere, Pacific Ocean. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the commute to work just got more entertaining...
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
...Considering that you can go out and buy a houseboat in Seattle or many other places, I wonder how anyone ever thought to make houses that float. Genius, I say!
This kinda reminds me of that giant floating refugee camp in the novel Snow Crash.
That didn't exactly end well for anyone..
Misread tweet as "Floating Houses Designed For Low-Flying Countries", clicked, and now disappointed. Also less confused.
We and all other nations in the world do not recognize the occupation and annexation of our land by the Pacific ocean as legal. We shall maintain out statehood and membership to the UN even though evicted from our land onto a floating reservation. Even though this may last for several millenia, we consider the current situation as temporary only
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I think those disappearing islands would be better off digging up the top layer of dirt and raising their island with imported garbage, then cover with top soil and plants. I would think you only need 2 meters to keep their island homes above water, and the first world nations would likely cover the full cost just to be rid of the junk. Having a floating home won't do any good without a job to pay for it, you may as well move to somewhere dry.
Such housing technology could also allow small island-states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans
What's next? "Floating rainwater basins", "floating desalination plants" or "regular shipment of bottled water"? "Floating coconut farms" maybe?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If the land belonging to these nations goes underwater for any length of time... who cares if their houses are intact? With no land, they've likely lost any ability to sustain themselves individually or as a culture.
Or are these floating houses edible and self-repairing?
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Pretty sure people have been living on boats for a long time now. It combines all of the charm of living in a trailer with the joy of not having stable ground under your feet. It's not terrible, but the idea of a region changing en-mass to living in houseboats is absurd. What use is having a floating house if the roads are always flooded out and the utilities don't work?
There are much better solutions to the problem if you live in a flood prone area.
I read the internet for the articles.
.... Noah.
Damn! Not enough room for the elephants or the donkeys. I guess you guys will have to fight it out as the water rises.
Have gnu, will travel.
Atlantis per Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias
Shamelessly ripped off of elsewhere, which ripped it off:
The lost city of Atlantis has two chief characteristics, firstly that it was located in the centre of a perfectly level, rectangular shaped plain in a continent opposite the Strait of Gibraltar and secondly and probably most importantly, that it had the distinctive shape of a circular central island surrounded by concentric rings of land and sea "enclosing each other like cartwheels"
And doesn't Floating city sound terribly prone to be destroyed by hurricane?
I read "Floating Houses Designed For Low-FLying Countries" and immediatly thought of buildings hovering in the air above. Damn, 'cos that'd be cool.
We've been looking at the weather for thousands of years. Historic records of permanently submerged civilizations seem to be nebulous at best (Noah in Atlantis maybe?)
The next hundred years is a ways off. At least several more emerging "the sky is falling" hysterical periods will occur as we gain a better understanding of the ecosystem that is our home. We've already moved from the "Global Warming" to the "Climate Change" hysterical model in just the last decade.
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This really sounds like an "island" from the movie Waterworld...
Why do I get this really bad image of the movie "Waterworld" in my head when reading the summary and comments thus far....
A lot of problems would go away if the US would simply get rid of its government flood insurance program. If you want to build a house somewhere its likely to get flooded, and its too risky for a private insurer to cover, and the bank won't loan without insurance... it won't get built. .
A couple years ago I thought it would be a great idea to create a floating city in an expensive area like off San Deigo or San Fransisco where space and price are premium.
If you could make a floating city you could earn 2 - 3 million a house. That is a lot of cash that would yield a great ROI and give price relief to those who live in these metropolitan areas. Just a thought I had.
All you would need is the same rubber foam used to float various structures near the shore. Do it on a massive scale and you make gold.
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When I was growing up, during visits to my grandmothers we would visit the Ouachita river to fish. Yes it's a word. It's from some Amerind culture.
There were lots of structures that were built on 55 gallon barrels and tied to trees with big ropes for the annual floods. They even had a union in the gas pipe so that the gas could be turned off and the house allowed to float up off the foundation.
When the flood was over the neighbors would get together and help put everyone's house back where they belonged.
Floating houses another recycled idea. Hopefully someone hasn't tried to patent it. There is plenty of prior art.
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what a dumb idea - you can't float a country. Those people are fucked. In 200 years we will all be living at the Arctic circle....
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what we need is a free market solution. maybe if we started charging money for seawater, people wouldn't be so wasteful with it.
Uhm guys, floating houses already exist for decades here in the Netherlands, and then I don't even count our famous "woonboot" (houseboat), which would extend that period to hundreds of years. Looks like the world is reinventing the wheel, except that a wheel of course quite useless in water...
Floating houses for low-flying countries.
It made me think of the airborne aircraft carrier in Sky Captain and the World of tomorrow... only entire countries instead of just an aircraft carrier. That would be pretty awesome.
+ nasty storm = ?
It's called a boat.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Most of the "at risk" countries have populations that have yearly incomes in the hundreds or thousands not tens of thousands a year. High tech solutions aren't a solution. Unless they can build the structures with the available resources it's no option. I'd be more impressed if the solution involved Bamboo instead of a petro chemical like styrofoam. Looks good on paper but it's not a practical or realistic solution.
Floating houses were already designed 1000's of years ago, they're called boats.
But on topic, 'floating' houses are nothing new, we've had them for decades already here in the Netherlands
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Well. We all remember what "a flood" will look like. For low-laying countries this could very well look the same, so even IF the house will float you'll have to look for it between tons of rubble, driftwood and cars...
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on the surface of very dense and usually very viscous fluid. It becomes apparent in case of large natural disasters. However, most houses aren't built with that in mind and therefore when soil shows its fluidity, houses tend to capsize, get torn apart, float away, or even sink.
... doesn't have to be much, but it has to be actual land. And if you want to claim some sort of exclusive economic rights over the surrounding seas the land has to be habitable (look up Okinotori Islands). A perpetually floating house is a ship even if it used to be moored on solid ground. And it can't be registered in a country that doesn't exist because it's underwater.
But I don't suppose your lack of statehood would be your most pressing concern.
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Too bad the Atlantians didn't think of this.
I want to shoot the messenger!
They invented a boat.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I always wondered why no one ever put pontoons on a trailer home. The attach an anchor to the bottom for when it floats up.
The ISLANDS most at risk of submersion are those which are hit by typhoons, or whose coral or sedimentary runoff are damaged. Those are the known examples. The COUNTRIES most at risk of submersion are those whose governments think they can get the most money by making such claims.
Am I the only one who read "Floating Houses Designed For Low Flying Countries"?
I've heard about this general concept for over a decade. But I have yet to hear of homes actually being built using it. Most homes are not built on flood planes over 10' deep, making simply building the house on an above ground garage far more economical.
So in addition to cars, telephone poles etc careening down the streets in the event of a flood, what we *really* need is 1000 tons of floating bricks and mortar bearing down on us...
Noah called claiming prior art
yea, we have seen this stuff before:
http://www.coastalcontractor.net/article/189.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113513752
http://www.buoyantfoundation.org/
I guess "buoyant house" would be a better description
jp
No no no! This will not do! This is a market solution! Market solutions are of the devil! Only government solutions will do! Just pay your taxes to Al Gore and he will wave his magic wand and all your problems will instantly evaporate! Someone needs to arrest these evil entrepreneurs for coming up with solutions that don't involve ManBearPig and Hockystick horror movies!
SHAME SHAME! :D
The NFIP was created because people were already building houses (and businesses) in floodplains and no insurer was willing to insure them. Moreover, it was the same 1968 legislation that created the NFIP that mandated flood insurance if a mortgage was to be issued for a property in a floodplain. So your guess that banks would not be willing to lend money without homeowners having flood insurance is factually incorrect unless you presume that the legislation requiring flood insurance was passed but the accompanying federal insurance program was not.
Moreover, since many of the floodplains in question were /created/ by the federal government through its river management policies, it was thought at the time to be sensible to make the feds responsible for insuring households built in the floodplains. Were it not for the US Army Corps of Engineers, after all, the Mississippi would no longer go through New Orleans to get the Gulf of Mexico. Dredging rivers, digging channels, installing locks, building levies and flood walls have all altered the natural floodplains of virtually every major river in the US.
Or perhaps just using landfill to raise agricultural zones above sea level.
Or, like many countries do, import food. Despite living the US, I have to go out of my way to get fresh fruit that wasn't grown in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, etc.
Do you make the line of demarcation consistently annual floods, five year floods, fifty year floods, hundred year floods?
Moreover, what if the feds build a new levy and create a new floodplain? Or what it isn't the feds but mother nature? After all, the Mississippi would have an entirely different course to the Gulf if the feds hadn't intervened. Imagine that they didn't. Now you've got a very large new floodplain that was previously not a floodplain.
And what about economics? Perhaps the only places that large sectors of the population can afford to build houses is in a floodplain because such real estate is dirt cheap. If you make such real estate off limits, you not only create other problems but also make other real estate artificially more expensive because now there will be more people competing for less space.
Live below sea level (New Orleans)... Near a lake (Pontchartrain) & river (Mississippi)... Next to a large body of water (Gulf of Mexico)... Where Hurricanes are a common occurance.
I wonder if there is anyother way to keep safe & dry without resorting to living on land-locked boats?
To quote Sam Kinnison - Move!
Ken
The only time the region flooded to the point where my house would have been under water (had it been built then) was 1913.
I think you underestimate just how much of US geography is in a flood plain and the social and financial costs of relocating all the residents that are in said flood plains.
Our family lives in a flood area. almost every year it happens. But in larger floods you have to be ready. We tied canoes to our house so when the flood hit we could paddle to relatives that lived on high ground. On the property we lived we all pitched in together and built a home that would float (but not float away) when the flood waters hit. It would raise up and the pipes below had break away piping that would allow the home to float up. the power lines were all done above ground so it had power, just not working water. but all in all a floating house made it very nice for the people living in it since all their things did not get ruined and everything was intact.
...For some reason I thought they meant floating in midair. Silly me.
Hovercraft houses would be awesome, though. And incredibly impractical. :P
I am not devoid of humor.
Too late for that, the east coast of the US has seen earthquakes and floods already, locusts seem likely.
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