Hurricanes will have to huff and puff to level this building experiment
Charles Mandel
Sun
Imagine your house on steroids. That’s the idea behind fortified homes, the latest home-building trend in the wake of the powerful hurricanes that ripped apart houses along the U.S. Gulf Coast this year.
The North American insurance industry is encouraging builders to construct houses capable of withstanding extreme conditions, with such features as armour-like garage doors and frames made of fibreglass composite or precast concrete.
In Canada, scientists from the University of Western Ontario are studying how to build better, stronger houses at the so-called Three Little Pigs facility. Inside a hangar at the London, Ont., airport, researchers are constructing a two-storey, wood frame house that will be subjected to simulated hurricane-force blasts.
“What we’re interested in doing is developing science-based evidence on how a house bears load, so that it will perform better in an extreme event,” says Mike Bartlett, an associate professor in Western’s faculty of civil and environmental engineering. “Current Canadian housing is not bad, but we think it could probably be improved.”
That’s a sentiment many in Canada’s insurance industry share.
“We need to see this as a growing and urgent issue that we all need to respond to,” says Kathy Bardswick, CEO of the Co-operators Group, a conglomerate of Canadian insurance companies.
While Canada hasn’t experienced the same level of devastation as the American south, climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of storms and consequently the property damage price tag, according to insurers.
“We thought last year was a significant year for storms and yet this year Ontario saw its most serious storm ever,” Bardswick says. The damage from the August storm in the Toronto area resulted in a $500-million payout.
In the West, summer storms that battered southern Alberta cost insurers an estimated $275 million.
Ice storms, fires and vicious winter blizzards are battering Canadians. “We’re seeing more damage to homes all across the country,” says Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Toronto-based Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.
Kovacs is leading the charge for fortified housing in Canada. The institute is introducing a new program which advocates homes be built with certain features in order to become certified as a fortified.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
