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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."
Everyone thinks Slashdot is mostly read by tech nerds. Nonsense - most Slashdotters are frustrated proofreaders.
While I agree that owning land is an absurdity, "Just move somewhere better!" is one of the least logical cries of the over-privileged.
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.
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.
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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