PANEL 4 : BUILDING ISSUES

Creating Flood-Resilient Buildings: Strategies for Housing

floating house Innovative Green Solutions has worked with the Army Corps of Engineers and Rutgers University to create a 100% recycled material impervious to corrosion, rot, rust and insects. Applicable to construction including railroad bridges and floating housing, this material plays a role in market transformation and the creation of clean jobs. In anticipation of major sea level rise by 2020, Jackson, working with Elizabeth English of the Buoyant Foundation Project, has designed a coastal shotgun house retrofit with the IGS thermal plastic or steel material to create a buoyant foundation. - Lisa Jackson

The definition of resilience is derived from the perspective of one's profession, a structural engineer or a planner or the leader of a non-profit. Above all, resilience is an effort to reduce the probability and consequences of failure. In the aftermath of a catastrophic event, "housing infrastructure is fundamental for community resilience." Friedland notes a marked lack of data on the vulnerability of housing to catastrophic flooding events and is looking to better define this. - Carol Friedland

The University of New Orleans' Center for Hazard Assessment, Response and Technology (CHART) studies structural and nonstructural hazard mitigation, while addressing the social, economic and political dimensions of technology. The organization arose from studying nonstructural solutions in coastal Louisiana to El Nino in the 1990's. Laska outlines numerous efforts underway at CHART, including: (1) a FEMA-funded mapping of drainage weak points in the City, used to identify housing in need of elevation, (2) an effort with the art community to incorporate elevated housing into the "cultural memory" of New Orleans, (3) a gap analysis of mitigation measures in post-Katrina New Orleans, with policy and implementation recommendations, and (4) creating an executive workshop for government officials who are not involved in “risk literacy” - the technical aspects of mitigation. - Shirley Laska

New Orleans is, structurally, and always has been fairly flood resistant. Most historic structures are elevated three to four feet, and models exist for housing elevated at ten to 12 feet. Building materials, however, need to be mold and mildew resistant, easy to deconstruct, and fast-drying. In this region, housing should have rigid insulation screwed beneath the floor and is easy to remove, as Global Green has done in Holy Cross. Decentralizing the power grid and improving stormwater management would also make a more flood-resilient city. - Daniel Winkert

The Buoyant Foundation Project consists of a shotgun house retrofit that allows the house to float when it floods. In place of elevating houses to ten or 12 feet, the design preserves the spatial and social qualities of the New Orleans neighborhood and street-based cultural communities now endangered by catastrophic events. The BFP model is an engineered combination of culture, non-engineered amphibian homes constructed by natives along the Mississippi River over the past decades, and precedent of amphibian structures in the Netherlands and other international regions. Thermal plastic timber, as discussed by Lisa Jackson of Innovative Green Solutions earlier in this panel, will provide the termite-, rot- and corrosion- resistant, non-toxic, 100% recycled structure for the buoyant foundation. A prototype has been successfully tested at Louisiana State University. - Elizabeth English

The LIFT house is a pilot project for amphibious housing for low-income communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh completed in January 2010. Dhaka, a city with 28% of the population below the poverty line and poor drainage problems, is almost annually inundated by catastrophic flooding. The LIFT house increases resilience for those struggling to survive these events in a country that cannot afford to maintain a levee system or other large-scaled engineered responses. The construction of the LIFT house provides job training and incorporates renewable resources (solar panels) and materials (bamboo) produced by the local population. The pilot is detached from the city's service grid, filters and recycles rainwater, treats sewage through composting, and currently houses two families. The pilot demonstrates two proposed foundations: the use of 8,000 recycled plastic water bottles, and a ferrous metal foundation. - Prithula Prosun