Building the Ultimate Safe House

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.''

Comments

Illegal

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:Illegal

[BenEnglishAtHome]

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.

Or... go old school

[MangoCats]

Go old school and build a concrete dome. These are nothing new, very strong, and energy efficient.

Re:Or... go old school

[Dyolf Knip]

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.

Re:They'll take..

[Greyfox]

They've been selling a lot of those to private citizens lately. IIRC they usually go for a couple million and they pull out all the interesting stuff, but you still get a couple of miles of underground tunnels designed to withstand a nuclear blast. The original generators were designed to run a year without contact from the outside world and there was room for a year's worth of food storage, too. Just put your own generators and fuel tanks in, restock the food supplies and you could hole up for damn near anything. Maybe even a civilization-devastating asteroid impact, as long as it's not a direct impact where you live.

Re:dramatic design hype

[Migraineman]

Most people don't comprehend the "layers" concept. We lost power for three solid days. I've got a 2kW inverter and four Group 31 deep-cycle batteries to power the fridge and sump pump. They will hold me for 48-hours with realistic power management. We have a 200A alternator on the garden tractor that will recharge a battery in under an hour. We used about two gallons of gasoline keeping the electricity available.

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.