[Greenbuilding] [BULK] Flood Resilient Housing

[Nick Pine]

Lawrence <LLile at projsolco.com> writes:

> 2. Stilts are the way to go.  We have a whole town up on stilts now,
> Lupus, Mo Population 29, with five or six houses up in the air...

After numerous floods, Soldier's Grove, WI (pop 622) considered stilts
and a new $6 million berm from the Army Corps of Engineers. In the end,
they moved the commercial part of town uphill and passed a law saying
all new buildings must be at least 50% solar-heated, which they achieved
with solar attics (a nearby hill shaded the ground.) Drew Gillett and I
wrote a story about it: "Soldier's Grove Soldiers On," in the Nov/Dec
2003 issue of Solar Today. See http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick
Stilts mighta worked better, providing parking space below and keeping
the business and people parts of town together, vs creating a need
for more transportation.

> 3... The 100 year flood line, for practical purposes, DARN NEAR
> GUARANTEES that a flood will probably reach at least that high during
> your lifetime.* ... Translate this language this way: that's the flood 
> that has a
> 1% chance of happening every year, and it CAN happen every year.

> 6. Regulations around here prohibit people from boxing in the first
> floor of the stilt houses.  Generally you park your car under the house,
> park your lawnmower, or use it as a covered porch.  Some people put a
> screen around it, using that open slat board stuff, or chain link fence,
> but if you put up much of a wall, you are putting up a sail that could
> push down your house in a flood.

We have a new local double-wide next to a creek up on 14'x16"x16"
CMU piers on 12'(?) centers with no wind bracing. It looks strange
and scary. Nothing below but a propane tank and a canoe. A good
architect might have done more with that space.

> 7... Solar still works, although mass will become more expensive
>to place, up in the air, since you have to support it with something.

We might store cloudy-day heat on the ground in a large unpressurized
well-insulated tank with an air-water heat exchanger above and a skirt
with lots of breakaway plastic glazing, eg 4'x8'x10 mil 17 pound GE
HP92W Lexan polycarbonate panels with 1x3 frames and a 3" bolt
from front to back in the center to post-tension the Lexan to prevent
oilcanning and wind fatigue.

> *Hopefully Nick and Reuben will forgive the loose statistical math here.
> A 1% chance of something happen does not, mathematically, guarantee
> that it will happen once in 100 years, or ever.

If it fails to happen with probability (1-0.01)^100 = 37% in 100 years,
it would happen with a 63% probability. If it happens 1% every year,
2 years in a row be 0.01%, 3 would be 1 in a million, and so on...

Nick