Engineers Design Tornado Proof Home 189
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."
Re:Holy stupid ideas, batman (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree that owning land is an absurdity, "Just move somewhere better!" is one of the least logical cries of the over-privileged.
Re:Provincialism (Score:3, Insightful)
To an American a hundred years is a long time, and to a Briton a hundred miles is a long distance.
Re:Provincialism (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet houses like mine that are 60 years old are better built than the crap built today.
3/4" thick plywood, real brick and stone and not the styrofoam crap. 6" thick outer walls, real rafters and eaves that extend out. etc....
all homes built today are garbage compared to a properly built home from the 50's
Re:Tornado *resistant*... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Provincialism (Score:4, Insightful)
What's your record on aerial bombardment? Location matters.
Re:Holy stupid ideas, batman (Score:4, Insightful)
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.