Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
#DeleteChrome
And doesn't Floating city sound terribly prone to be destroyed by hurricane?
If it truly floats, redesigned rather.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Would? We already do. And by the way, some of us here aren't complete douches and think helping your neighbors is the right thing to do. We're all humans and my family certainly didn't evolve here naturally. I have no more right to this land than you or anyone else.
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?
These guys are just out there. You're going to float a house on Styrofoam in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Maybe they've been fooled by the name (Pacific - Peaceful) but one little baby typhoon is going to put your Styrofoam and assorted crap in the middle of the Pacific garbage patch. If you want to create floating cities, then go ahead and do so. The tech is there, it's just expensive.
This might work in a low lying area that gets flooded every couple of years (although the stilt idea previously mentioned seems easier) but it's not going to float well. Somebody needs to torpedo this concept before anyone gets wet.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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. .
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.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
Labor day in the US has nothing to do with the War of Independence. It is the US version of International Workers Day (May Day). It's a Union/socialist holiday. Interestingly, May Day actually commemorates a US event: the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. For political reasons, in the US, they didn't want to commemorate the massacre, so opted for a more generic Labor day in September promoted by the Central Labor Union.
what we need is a free market solution. maybe if we started charging money for seawater, people wouldn't be so wasteful with it.
It made me think of the airborne aircraft carrier in Sky Captain and the World of tomorrow...
And that made me think of Angelina Jolie.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not exactly. They build their homes on stilts, so they remain above water during the seasonal flooding.
What junk? Typical landfill junk decomposition produces dioxins. There is a reason why you don't want your house on a graveyard or a landfill. Also what about the drinking water? I bet the surrounding sea ecosystem wouldn't be overly happy about it either.
They've been doing it for years, if you define "environmental refugee" as "talented rugby player".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually douches are bad for vaginas...
- Raynet --> .
Too much legalese.
The current international law is just a collection of all the contracts and agreements that have proved to either work well enough to be enforced or to be of so theoretical nature that no one ever had a reason to challenge it.
So whenever a situation occurs that was never part of the considerations around those rules, the rules will be written anew. There is no Supreme World Court (ok., there is the International Criminal Court, but it is ignored by the U.S.), which decides case law and provides some sort of continous interpretation and development of the rules.
Celebrating May Day (May 5) dates back about 3000 years before the existence of the US. It's an ancient pagan festival called Beltaine, that marks the halfway point between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, and the start of the summer planting season. Most of the symbols and rituals surrounding Beltaine are about fertility and celebrating life.
As with most pagan festivals, it's been claimed and modified by modern folks, but you can still find the roots of the ancient festival in the modern practice... the most visible for May Day would be dancing around the may pole, but there's other elements of the ancient festival that have made it into the modern version. For further enlightenment, look up Ostara, Samhain, and Yule, all of which show up in the xian calendar in different forms.
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.
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.
miami, ft lauderdale, houston, galveston, wilmington, lower manhattan, long island, etc.
I could go on and on.
New Orleans didn't invent "living below sea level"
now living in a spillway, the atchafalaya, which is flooded (by man, by God indirectly) fairly often, and is within the path to the Gulf that the mississippi really wants to go (very much so, in fact) - now that is a different story.
those folks know the risk and use buoyant foundations (trailers with styrofoam underneath) to maintain their homes.
they love living out there (it is real nice), and they understand they could lose everything one day.
other parts of the mississippi flood plain include MANY areas up north that flood MUCH more regularly, so lay off of new orleans
jp