Tsunami Houses

[Daddymem]

Interesting article in the Sunday Paper about and MIT project involving building Tsunami resistant houses.  I checked out the website  http://senseable.mit.edu/tsunami-prajnopaya/  and found construction plans that may be of interest to people trying to homestead in a warm weather location since they are also designed to let breezes flow through the houses.  These could be useful in velocity zone areas.  http://senseable.mit.edu/tsunami-prajnopaya/CD2.pdf

enjoy

[Amanda_931]

I can remember a longish discussion on another list whether it was better for building in the tropics--in the path of tropical storms or where there is tsunami danger--to build lightly, so you could let the house go but rebuild easily, or really really heavily, so it probably wouldn't go at all, but if it did it would be a serious pain to rebuild.

And security, in the modern era, is an issue when building super-lightly.

Kind of looks like they are trying to split the difference there.

Rather a lot of us had lived in tropical, storm, tsunami and seismic areas.  Or all four.

(When I lived there Honolulu had city--probably island--wide Civil Defense sirens.  The system was divided into two, coastal and inland--the coastal sirens went off when there was a tsunami alert, except for one morning about three when some fool hit the wrong button, and the siren just uphill from my place below Round Top went off.  As I recall, I didn't wonder whether we were under attack, but whether some fool had hit the wrong button, but then I hadn't lived through Pearl Harbor)

Those huge overhangs are nice, unless wind or water gets up that high--that ridge vent is probably a goner in a monsoon--the houses that survived Hurricane Andrew the best were nasty little places with no overhangs to speak of, according to news reports.  Well, those and some ferrocememt buildings that the Habitat organization was building down there.  

Interesting ideas in the design.

Bamboo is sure a nice material.