Houses able to float being developed to address flooding

by
in environment on (#1GKEC)
story imageA radical new solution is being proposed to solve the housing crisis - homes that float. Designers say homes that would rise with flood waters could be built on land otherwise deemed unsuitable because of flooding concerns. Each home can react to flood risk because the guide piles allow the building to rise in significant flood conditions, because of the buoyant basement structure. As flood waters recede the houses resettle to their original levels.

This is hardly the first attempt to develop land vulnerable to flooding. There are 20,000 fully-floating and can-float homes already built in the Netherlands.

Back in the mid-1870s, Sacramento, California raised the level of its downtown by approximately 10 feet (3 meters) to eliminate devastating flooding. They built reinforced brick walls on downtown streets, and filled the resulting street walls with dirt. Building owners either raising their building slowly with the use of numerous screw jacks, or buried the ground floor. Thus the previous first floors of buildings became the basements.

Of course these solutions are no help if it is just the value of your house and mortgage that is "underwater".

An innocent question (Score: 2, Interesting)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2016-06-09 20:23 (#1GPBW)

If you're afraid your house might be flooded out, and you're bound and determined nevertheless to build it in such an unsuitable place for whatever reason, why not just build it on stilts in the first place, rather than go to all the trouble to put in stilts AND a mechanism to allow it to ride up on those stilts?

The articulation to allow it to climb and descend the stilts constitutes a vulnerability. What if one or more points binds, and it cocks and jams because it's trying to rise crookedly?
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