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Engineers Design Tornado Proof Home
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Emily Badger writes at the Atlantic that it's not too hard to build a tornado proof home but it's pretty difficult to design one that's liveable. "If you made a perfect earthquake structure, it would be a bunker with 24-inch walls and one small steel door for you to get in," says architect Michael Willis. That structure would be based on the empirical measurements of structural engineers. "You could design it to be perfectly resistant. But it would not be a place you'd want to live." The task behind the "Designing Recovery" competition (PDF): was to design a liveable tornado proof home in a part of the country where the geology makes it impossible to build tornado cellars or basements. Q4 Architects designed a safe space within a home instead of a shelter underneath it, a kind of house inside of a house. The result is an idea that could be replicated anywhere in tornado alley: a highly indestructible 600 square-foot core of concrete masonry, hurricane shutters and tornado doors where a family could survive a tornado and live beyond it, with several more flexible (and affordable) rooms wrapped around it. "It's going to do it's best to fight the tornado," says Elizabeth George." "Part of your house might get torn away, but the most important parts of the house are safe. After the disaster, everything is not lost. You're able to keep the most valuable things, which are the people, the functions of the house, and maybe your valuables." The genius of this idea is that while it would be significantly more expensive to build out the same tornado precautions for the entire home, the CORE house is meant to be constructed for under $50,000."
You're able to keep the most valuable things, which are the people, the functions of the house, and maybe your valuables
Just putting that out there.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Living in tornado alley I must protest that one does not make a tornado "proof" home, one makes a tornado resistant home. The idea that you can make a home tornado "proof" is greatly misleading and like saying you can make an armored vehicle bomb "proof". You can only make things resistant to a given degree - this in important technicality on a tech site.
Tornadoes are these machinations of nature that are perfectly capable of lifting the foundations of a freeway out of a ground and flinging semi trucks through the air. When the news covers an area that was hit the word used to describe the people that lived is always "survived". Bad headline, bad headline.
what is even funnier is that tornado safe rooms have been designed for the last couple of decades, and a concrete bunker in the center of the house isn't a new idea.
the problem is twofold.
the average age of a house in the USA is 30-40 years old. that means things like decent insulation are still far beyond them let alone double pane windows. None of those houses can have a safe room easily or cheaply.
Second none of these are cheap period. a $30,000 addition to even a $300,000 house is a serious investment. The people who really need these are those who can't afford them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Anyone who bought a house on a floodplain in tornado country is a goddamned idiot.
Then anyone who lives in a known major earthquake zone is an idiot, so most of California (actually the whole West Coast) should be abandoned. Alternatively, they could have building codes that minimize loss of life in the event of an earthquake, but that's just swimming against the tide, isn't it?
While I agree that owning land is an absurdity, "Just move somewhere better!" is one of the least logical cries of the over-privileged.
Not a surprise that a piece about dgging a storm-proof hole is written by someone called Emily Badger.
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To an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Briton a hundred miles is a long distance.
I met a guy who built homes by pouring concrete into Styrofoam forms with rebar. After that it was brick veneer or siding outside and the usual stuff on the inside. He said they also tied the roof using the same materials they do in hurricane prone areas. He said homes like this had been hit dead on by tornadoes and other than broken windows and superficial damage were essentially unharmed. This building technique also make a very energy efficient home.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller had built several that are tornado and hurricane proof. He made several concrete dome homes that have taken the worst that nature can dish out and only need minor repairs.
Heck they are sharknado proof.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I watched a video some time back about a hurricane proofed house. It looked pretty much like a standard house. But when that thing shuttered up it was sealed TIGHT. And I do know that Stanley of all companies designed a nail that would not just tear out of wood, thereby lessening the chance roof components could be lifted.
You can build a structure to combat hurricanes and tornadoes - but it isn't going to be THAT cheap. Given that fact I have no intention of living anywhere beyond the northeast U.S. None! Sure, we get a little geologic action from time to time, and hurricanes get here about once every 30 or so years though the cycle seems to have been shortened lately.
FEMA has instructions on how to build a safe-room into your home..
http://www.fema.gov/safe-rooms
It's been up for years, and the instructions are clear enough for a do-it-yourselfer to do, or to hand off to a contractor to build.
How big you make the room(s) is up to you. If you're in a tornado area, it wouldn't be a bad idea to make effectively a studio apartment. That could be a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen pantry. That way, if your house was completely blown away, you'd still have somewhere to live.
If you can afford a $50k room for something statistically rare, you can make a nice home theater (aka "man cave"). A theater room is better without windows, and soundproof from the rest of the house. With independent emergency power, you could camp out in it, and watch movies through the apocalypse, and come out sometime after its done.
We've been discussing making our safe room here. Unfortunately, most of Florida is not only a tornado risk, but a flood zone. You get both risks during hurricanes. So you may be in the totally safe shelter room from the house falling down around you, but if your exits are blocked, you may end up drowning in the same room.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If the tornado left behind clay then you can pretty sure that a shallow dome-shaped building with concrete walls (or thick clay walls for that matter) would survive.
I would think the key to building a completely and utterly tornado-proof building is building it out of heavy materials that are hard for the wind to pick up and making sure the airflow over the building remains smooth and free of turbulence. You want smooth, flowing exterior surfaces. You do not want flat walls and corners that create turbulence.
The hard part is coming up with a practical and reasonably priced home that would also be completely tornado-proof. There are lots of good practical and economical reasons why most houses are more or less shaped like cuboids.
And it would probably pop apart in the first tornado or hurricane since it most likely doesn't have roof straps. Then you're buried under 3/4" plywood, those six inch outer walls and six decades of dirt swept into the corner.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Joplin Hospital begs to differ. Yet, it was still standing and moved by all of 4 inches (which, however, was sufficient to make it uneconomic to repair). People died either because they couldn't be moved away from the windows in time (being in a bed in a hospital). Or because they depended on ventilators for breathing that lost power due to wind/hail/rain damage on powerlines and emergency backup.
Reinforced concrete is perfectly sufficient to withstand an EF-5. Unfortunately, most buildings in the US are made of reinforced cardboard.
What's your record on aerial bombardment? Location matters.
Guess what? You can already build a concrete dome for around that much money. It will protect the whole house. OMGWTFBBQ this is a solved problem.
;)
Holy fail to read even TFS, Batman!
"You could design it to be perfectly resistant. But it would not be a place you'd want to live". Most people would not want to live in a giant concrete dome (though I personally would, and I suspect you'll find a fairly unrepresentatively large sample of Slashdotters who would say the same). Simple as that.
That said...
I have an even better solution, though. Fucking move. Anyone who bought a house on a floodplain in tornado country is a goddamned idiot.
This, a thousand times this! Every time I hear about the federal government bailing out people stupid enough to live a place likely to get wiped out once a decade or so, I can't help but think exactly what you've expressed. The US has vast tracts of uninhabited, relatively safe land, yet we have people trying to live in the worst possible choices. Flood zones, tornado alley, scrub-brush tinderboxes, earthquake central.
I have nothing against having FEMA around for the freak "storm of the century" events. But if your day-to-day life at least part of the year involves always listening for that warning klaxon in the distance - You should not live where you do, should not expect the rest of us to bail you out - Period.
Holy stupid comments batman.... That is true in every state.
While I agree that owning land is an absurdity, "Just move somewhere better!" is one of the least logical cries of the over-privileged.
Let's be clear, I don't even own a home. But neither does someone whose home is redistributed across seven counties by the weather.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your 60 year old home is better than the majority of homes built 60 years ago, which is why yours is still standing when most of them are not
Really? Not on Long Island, and I doubt it's because of stricter building codes. For example, there are thousands of houses in Levittown, which were built as tiny inexpensive homes, and the last of them was built exactly 60 years ago. They're virtually all standing, have been expanded, and are in good shape. In my town, there are lots of houses built in the 1920's (a construction boom era), and quite a few that date back further than that.
Cities were built in these areas because rivers and oceans are vital routes of transportation, the fishing is good, the minerals are there to be mined, or the soil is fertile. Of course that doesn't matter now. We have highways and we can just send a few people out to the fertile soil areas to tend the robot workers. It'll take some doing, but we can move everybody to minimal hazard areas and use our cheap energy to do things that need to be done in the hazard areas... just in time for the energy to become really expensive or unattainable. Don't worry though, it'll be all good. Somebody will be mocking the people who pay $100/gal for gasoline. He'll say, "fucking move".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Wind has nothing to push against.cheap.
For hurricanes and floodings, which could devastate large areas in a single event, I see your point. However, a single tornado usually impacts only a small area. The probability of an individual house in Tornado Alley being struck by an F4 or F5 tornado seems to be 10^(-7) per year. Economically, it makes more sense to insure the risk than to build an F4-tornado-proof house. I couldn't find probabilities for F3 tornadoes, but I could imagine that a similar argument holds there.
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The majority of tornadoes miss your house completely.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Quite the opposite actually. The smaller you build something, the easier it is for it to survive. The larger the house, the larger the area where the wind can push, the larger the forces that all the walls and structural members have to handle. Nobody would use the same thick walls of the first or second floor of a 14 storey building, if you weren't going to put the other 12 floors on top of it. It would be ludicrously overengineered for such a small thing.
It is much easier to build a small building to last a tornado than a big one. It is only hard to do so, if you think that two-by-fours are the paragon of stability.
When a tornado swept through Barneville Wisconsin, it flattened nearly the entire town. But the water tower remained standing. Now water towers are pretty heavy but their center of gravity is obviously very high. Traditional construction techniques favor rectangular homes or homes with right angle flat sides. Tornado survivable buildings should be another shape, something more like the domes used in Antarctica.
The US territory of Guam has hurricane proof and earthquake proof homes. They are built of concrete and come with built in storm shutters that can be opened and closed from the inside. There's no need for a dome to survive a typhoon (hurricane to mainlanders). Regular home shapes work well enough. They mainly ride out the storms within their own homes with very little loss of life and property. Contrast this with the US mainland with annual problems. Stop being cheap. Stop using wood in hurricane and tornado zones. They should just be replaced with concrete as they blow away. It saves both homeowenres and insurance companies a lot of money very long term.
The homes on Guam were replaced with concrete after the 1976 super typhoon (~150mph+) blew many of them away. They stopped building out of wood since that time. Before the 1980s, everyone sheltered in the reinforced concrete schools and waited out the typhoons, hoping their home hadn't blow away. The main problems after a typhoon now is repainting and cleaning up the yard. It's mostly cosmetic fixes. The only time they have major problems on Guam now is when a super typhoon (~150mph+) comes along about every 20-25 years and blows out the power lines and the concrete power poles. They could probably start putting some lines underground now to reduce the power outages, but they have quakes too and some areas are too low and easily flood during a typhoon. They had their 8.0 quake just over a decade ago too.