[TheForge] Is anyone on-line ? OT: Washed away?

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

Good suggestions ( imagining the traffic jams, grin).
When our house on the beach was being battered, we bolted plywood over the windows when the swell was large and/or the tides were extreme. I'll eventually build hinged steel shutters for this place for fires and the same could be sculpted for the clamshell house.
Years ago in a  coastal canyon north of LA, there was a wildfire followed by heavy rains with the usual results, and an irreverent areospace engineer bought a spectacular ridgetop property ( the house had slid) really cheap. He bulldosed pads on either side of the crest, ran lots of surplus steel cable across the crest from pad to pad and poured his reinforced slabs to build the house modules on. Let it slide, he said.The road remained out to all but 4 wheel drive vehicles for years and by the time the county officials revisited the area, his house was long since finished and partly hidden by landscaping. He just kept paying taxes on the original structure.

On Nov 7, 2012, at 7:12 AM, Bruce . wrote:

Don't need antigravity.  Use wheels.  Modular homes, each section of
which is mobile.  This would be ONE sort of construction that might
actually make sense in areas of risk -- with the proviso that they
WILL be moved before storms, etc., come through.  Expensive, but all
such construction is expensive.

Meanwhile, I have an interesting observation:  Sand dunes WORKED in
Ocean Grove and Bradley Beach.  The first line of houses behind the
beach -- about 100 feet behind the boardwalk and maybe 150 feet behind
the dunes -- still stands with little obvious damage.  There WAS
flooding, some of it pretty bad, but the force of the surge was broken
by the dunes.

(I cant GET to some other communities to check on them, but IIRC,
Belmar and Spring Lake didn't have much in the way of dunes.  (Spring
lake had low sand "bluffs" behind the ferro-concrete board walk.  That
boardwalk always takes a beating, and photos I've seen show it GONE
this time.)

Furthermore, at the north end of Ocean Grove, there's a beach access
point (between board walk and beach, through the dunes) with some sort
of woven mat -- not very thick or tight -- laid over the sand.  This
mat is largely intact and apparently functioned like dune grass on the
dunes.

In other words, the way to resist storms is to have flexibility in the
structure.  Imagine a beach home that is effectively a glorified tent.
That could be lovely for summer use, and could be designed to be
removable before a storm.  Maybe it could consist of some central
struts holding up the roof, with cables from those to give some
structure to roof and walls.  It could even be designed to retain
warmth for cold-weather use.  Properly designed, I assert such a
structure might better resist a storm than a standard wood-framed
house.

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Andrew Vida <osan at netlabs.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 11/6/2012 1:18 PM, Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer wrote:
>> The "cost-effective" part is the chancre.
> 
> Consider a screw-pile foundation.  At about $1500 per, and that is for
> domestic-strength piles, I'd bet a foundation for a 2500 sq. ft. house
> would be at least $100K... probable more - a lot more in fact, given
> what it would be expected to withstand.  "Commercial" grade screw piles
> are probably 10x that cost, but you'd need fewer of them.  Then what?  A
> great poured ferro-cement shell.  Windows would be very costly as well
> if you expect them to withstand such forces, and even then...  One 30'
> wind-driven wave and even that is gone.
> 
> Now, when someone develops practical and cheap antigravity, you can put
> up whatever flimsy piece of garbage residence you want and just fly it
> to gentler climes until the storm passes
-- 
Bruce
NJ
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