Building Smart and Building Dumb

By: George "Sonny" Hoffman

In no way affiliated with anyone doing anything, receiving no money from any enterprise, still offering my unbiased, self-proclaimed, expert opinions on a commercial-free website, the master of my domain.

Are hurricanes getting worse, or are we building dumber?

I submit that both may apply, and both are due to the human infestation of planet Earth. We may not like thinking of ourselves as a virus, but we sure are behaving like a virus infection out to kill the host body. The body seems to be reacting. Nature seems at war with us, and we are fighting. Flags fly in defiance. A hurricane's point of landfall is now called ground zero and bears a striking resemblance to one.

Although some thought has been given to weakening or steering tropical cyclones, and some thinking has been devoted to strengthening buildings, very little thought has been given to living with these storms and mimicking nature. The flora and fauna of nature does live with the recurring forces of nature. They do or they perish. How the Indians lived here before we showed them how to build houses might be illuminating.

They lived in round earthen huts that were on moderate high ground and they were mound builders. To ride out more serious weather events, they had mound shelters built on high ground, or caves, or made cliff dugouts, but they moved away from lowland coastal areas, returning to harvest the bounty of dead slow 'n stupid things. If a home or an entire village got wiped out, it was no big deal. Nothing valuable was lost and rare was the Indian that a hurricane could sneak up on to do harm. I'm sure their spirits marvel at how slow, deaf, dumb, blind, and braindead stupid we are. I imagine Mother Nature sits up each time and goes, "JESUS CHRIST!"

Structures built prior to 1950 do well in today's hurricanes, whereas those built most recently with the advantage of so much hindsight, foresight, insight, and advances in technology buttressed by a dedicated federal agency with billions upon billions for loans, grants, and aid to mitigate what a team of professors, engineers, researchers and scientists think should do well do very poorly. Why is that, you might ask.

For one, any old building still here to do well has proved itself by design, materials, and the craftsmanship. What we build today is designed by a computer, constructed of cheap composite materials, and is built by anybody who can operate a nail gun.

The building trades of today are like the two-by-fours of today, not what they used to be. A two-by-four used to measure two inches by four inches and was a stout, seasoned, hunk of lumber, as were the two-by-sixs and the four-by-eights. Today we settle for a half-inch shaved off each dimension in wood that a little over a decade ago was a seed in a pine cone. That load of wood we ordered is cut, milled, stacked, and on site within days of being a squirrel's home.

Walls used to be hard stuff to put a fist through, but lean too hard on a modern wall, you just might fall through into the next room. The wall board is chalk cake with a paper coating and interior doors are pressed paper with a very thin wood vineer. The home exterior can be sawdust and resin made to look like clapboard or brick. The latest composite to replace plywood is waferweld, a chip board product said to be "good as" plywood.

Evidently not, or is but only until it gets wet. None of it is as good as what it replaced, but it is all cheaper and/or easier to work with using production power tools and unskilled labor. Dry wall is a product that should never be used in any home that could possibly flood. If dry wall gets wet, it is ruined and simply disolves right off the wall, but we will nail up a wall of phoney green two-by-fours, sheathed with waferweld on the outside and dry wall on the inside, then marvel at what a hurricane can do.

We can easily and quickly erect houses and apartment buildings. We do it by the development, acres and acres going up like a composite park fungus, but not bad looking after the painters and landscapers get finished. Looks like hell after a hurricane gets finished, but not to worry, FEMA has a toll-free number.

Somebody should call that toll-free number and bitch to FEMA about allowing water soluable composites, chalkboard, particle-crap, scrap-wonders, and 1.5 by 3.5s in load-bearing walls in hurricane-prone areas. We need to ask why there is anything but steel reinforced concrete allowed in any potential surge or flood area. Steel reinforced concrete ( or solid wall brick and mortar) is the ONLY building material and method that repeatedly and consistantly survives the atmospheric forces of nature.

For a model, go visit any old lighthouse. You can build right on the water with waves lapping at your foundation, and you can go tall as you please, but your floor plan at every level will be a circle and hanging a painting will pose a problem.

After every hurricane we get example after example of what not to build and what to build instead. Round survives even when perched atop a single pole like a giant golf ball on a tee. Water towers do fine, because they are steel, anchored in concrete, and aerodynamic. When you ground something round, it'll stay.

For those who persist in building suburbia cracker boxes in hurricane landing areas, I say ban the square. Any box made of ninety-degree angles is the weakest form we can build. Any perfect sphere is the strongest. Any triangle is stronger than any polygon. I would also ban the gabled roof with asphalt shingles. Those traditional conventional roofs simply DO NOT work unless sheathed in steel and hurricane strapped to the foundation. Intelligent mitigation would ban all building materials that can't stand standing water or withstand winds up to 200mph.

Using a banned material should null and void the insurance, or at least be excluded from the coverage, ie carpet or some fancy new floating hardwood flooring for the great room. In a flood plain, the entire home needs to be coded like a basement and a bathroom. The roof absolutely MUST hold together and keep the water out.

A residential structure should not be able to produce or become F-type debris. No home should be able to leave its foundation to float like a boat. That bad house will take down a good house and create two huge masses of debris that will damage or destroy ten more houses that will all form a massive debris raft that can bulldoze a community. One bad apple spoils the barrel, but one bad house with waterfront and there goes the neighborhood.

In Waveland prior to Katrina, every waterfront home on South Beach Blvd was bad as I see and define bad, satisfactory as FEMA and NFIP sees and insures it. Every single one became F-type debris that took out all of the homes that stood between the beach and the railroad tracks. In that area were many homes that I would have called good and they should have stood. Only monolithic concrete can stand against a massive wall of construction debris being pushed by hurricane force winds and wind waves, but the front lines in Waveland featured none of those, nor were there any behind the line, a doomed community just waiting for its number to come up.

To combat such community calamity, war must be waged on F-type debris (flying or floating) with a focus on the houses that are up front, then on any with a potential to become a boat, then on those that could possibly lose a roof or parts thereof, then attention needs to be given to the stuff and clutter of grounds and surrounds, then trim and top the trees while planting barrier oaks and shrubs. The very destructive wind waves can be very easily defeated by landscape engineering.

Reduce fetch (the open water distance that wind needs to build waves), you reduce waves. The most destructive element of a hurricane is waves. They are even more destructive when loaded with construction debris. When one house goes, all that are down wind are in jeopardy. Never install or tolerate potential F-type debris between the beaches and the buildings. After Camille, Harrison County Mississippi built a boardwalk with their federal money the length of the county's beach front, a beautiful thing, but I saw millions of board feet of heavy lumber in a very bad place.

Post Katrina, more than half ended up going through their homes and businesses. A classic example of debris begatting debris, but in this case, destroying classic old homes that survived Camille. These same planners placed casino barges in front of their communities, so people gave little thought to what the boardwalk did.

For several decades I have been amazed at the lack of respect for the power of nature evident on the Mississippi coast, but in that county in particular, for that county experienced the national record storm surge that stood for thirty-six years. They knew exactly what could happen. When it happened again, they all looked dumb like the globe might be warming.

Sad fact of this modern age is the national president pledges to rebuild at the nation's expense. You can believe Harrison County will rebuild the boardwalk, and now Hancock County can get one. I see no evidence that anything has changed, but I never do, and it never does. It is like we are locked in an ever deepening and widening cycle of stupidity and simply swap sets of idiots from time to time.

My appeal for reason is to the individual citizen who is not part of the emergency management system or supporting political machine, for they are open to reason. Those working in the vortex have had all of their reason sucked into the black hole at the center where the head of FEMA has an office near the oval office at dead center ground zero stupidity.

Above all, wherever dynamic forces of wind and water will act on structures, build them aero AND hydro dynamic, especially if you refuse to challenge nature with concrete and steel. Even a geodesic dome built with modern two-by-fours and waferweld sheathing stapled on will stand up to any hurricane wind, IF you bolt the sill plate to a concrete foundation and allow pressure (wind and water) to equalize. Don't seal it up!

The single biggest mistake is building a cracker box home using sticks of wood and then sealing it as FEMA directs. Even a small surge or flood will rip that box from its foundation. Lose the roof and you have a box open top and bottom. How strong are those, and what is it like being in a box of composites and consumer trash that folds up. Few can tell us, because few have survived that experience. If I were the Emergency Management Czar, I would tattoo this on every single family home mitigator:

Enough have died to make such deadly homes illegal, but they are very legal, all built to the newer improved hurricane codes. They don't hold up any better, but they won't mangle, strangle, fold, spindle, and mutilate you so fast. The post-Katrina (Insert your preferred level of government letter here)EMA thought is go higher, but that will only place your box of crap up where the destructive waves are, also up where debris is blowing about unhindered and unarrested by water. In a community of tall cracker boxes run by ?EMA minions there WILL be millions of tons of debris and a plethora of dead bodies.

A home should never be a death trap or instrument of destruction, but many are. They only look strong, secure, safe, and storm worthy. A modern home offers the illusion of safety and security, which encourages a modern homeowner to try to ride an approaching storm out, and some do that with the entire family, even offering sanctary to others with older homes they don't feel safe and secure in.

If they put warnings on cigarette packs, bigger warnings should be placed on death trap homes. Here's my suggested warning label for the modern cracker box with two-by-four or six exterior walls sheathed with pressed wood chips and chalk:

Furthermore, I would identify all such death trap structures in a community and ban staying in them during any mandatory evacuation. Suicide is illegal if stupidy isn't. Encouraging others to commit suicide with you is VERY illegal, immoral, too. Keeping a dumb animal for company is cruelty to animals. We CAN do something, but we don't. When these people die, aren't we accessories to manslaughter, at least negligent homicide?

We now know which structures will and which will not survive a cat-5 hurricane, and all mitigation efforts should mitigate to worst-case. It does no service to a community to mitigate to a cat-3 and then be hit by a cat-4 or cat-5. Mitigate to a cat-5 and get hit by a cat-3, you have been of great service, assuming your cat-5 mitigations were true to a cat-5 storm.

In New Orleans, their cat-3 mitigations weren't even true to a cat-2. Cat-2 was what they got, and everything that should have been fine or worked well, failed. On the other hand, Katrina was as big and bad as hurricanes get. Obviously there is more to catagorizing a hurricane than simply measuring wind speed. Small, medium, large, and extra large might serve us better, and a Dominos Pizza manager could make the call after looking at a satellite image.

Seeing a rampaging Rita filling the entire Gulf, we may get a warning to brace for a deep pan supreme with everything. That should empty Houston as effectively as the National Hurricane Center's chief weather guesser forcasting a cat-5 and at considerably less expense with a lot less confusion. Even the poorest and least learned know pizza. Just make it relative to what they know, but keep calling Camille a cat-5 and Katrina a cat-3, when you warn of a cat-1 on the way there will be gridlocked freeways and short lines at Wal-Mart. Dem cat-ones got ta be Biblical.

So much for building dumb. What IS smart? Monlithic concrete in round form is smartest. Steel reinforced goes without saying, but when I use the term concrete, I am assuming the proper steel anchored to a sound foundation. Monolithic implies a single contiguous pour, but the reality is contiguous in staged pours. A concrete structure integrated with a solid foundation WILL survive. The bigger, the better. To survive even better, avoid subjecting flat walls to wind and wave action. Structures should not only be aerodynamic but hydrodynamic, too. Round is good. Round and smooth is even better. Half buried is best.

The hurricane proof home traps air not people and can be called a true storm shelter, but a hurricane "proof" home is designed to go "under" the waters of the surge. Those who like waterfront must build low and monolithic or broad-based and towering buildings of steel and concrete. Wavelanders lost their high-up highway 90 bridge, but their low highway 603 bridge on the same bay had no damage, because the 603 bridge was under several feet of water and missed the entire storm.

The second dumbest thing we do is go up. We build on stilts or piers. We haven't yet figured a way to do that for fishing piers and for bridges that must be up, so why build a small section of one and stick a box house on it, or a concrete dome for that matter. You are just putting the habitat up where the waves are going to be. That is a challenge to nature that you simply can not win. Your odds get worse the higher you go for the most disrupted winds are near the soil. The clean unbroken wind is high up.

You are not an America's Cup sailor. You are a hurricane survival candidate, so up is very bad and down is very good. If water gets between you and the soil, get in the water and go as low as you can in that. Any plan that has you starting off way up is a bad plan that will get worse when the storm surge brings the tide to your welcome mat. Clean air wind waves with lots of fetch will impress you. If your waterfront building code mandates you go up, pitch a bitch and bring me in as your expert.

Going up ain't smart, AND hurricanes prove that unwiseness again and again to no avail. We will go right back out there on a barrier island or low coastal ex-swamp and rebuild the same damn thing, maybe go higher. Why? Because we suffered no financial consequence the last time. In fact, we made out like a bandit, so let's do that again and pray for another boon disaster.

We now have states where disaster is their number one industry that brings in outside dollars by the billions. If they go a few years without one, the state economy suffers a depression. Louisiana might very well file bankruptsy if we put an end to disasters. That would be a true disaster. Florida might have to return to being a tourist and retirement state.

In addition to building with the right materials, use proven plans using a licensed and bonded contractor with experience. In any home shelter, build into it air-trapping space that can be presurized to push water down and out, keeping it down and out for the duration of need.

An entire home as an air-trapping shelter is the ultimate home for our coastal wetlands and barrier islands. This ultimate home should generate its own electricity, manufacture its own methane gas, draw its own water, and treat its own waste. For communications, this super dome home is totally independent by using satellite Internet.

A super dome home is beyond the means of most coastal habitaters, but the concrete home is within the means of anyone who can afford a cracker box. Your boy and his buddies could build it for you. Any kid who likes to build with Lego blocks can build with the giant Lego blocks of ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) home building. This technique builds super homes that stand up to all storms, hurricanes, even tornados. ICF homes survive earthquakes and fires. They love a good flood and you can't tell what they are by looking at them. They are bunkers made to look like a house inside and out. Only your insurance company need know that you live in a bunker. You will only stand out in a debris field along with domes and anything round.

Actually, they cost only slightly more to build but far less to operate and maintain. For the do-it yourselfers, the construction costs might even be less. In every way, ICF homes are better than what we now build and live in, and the hundreds of ICF and dome homes built in Florida since Andrew in '92 left the ICF and domes standing while all around were flattened, still have those homes and the new ICF homes standing undamaged by these new megacanes of the past few years.

The super home proves itself again and again, year after year, and against everything nature can throw at them--storms, tornados, floods, brush fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes.

The famous Dome of a Home built right on the beach at Gulf Shores, Florida, took a direct hit from Ivan the Terrible in 2004, then got hit by Dennis in '05, THEN Katrina, months later, and the only damage was the loss of its steps which were designed to break away. That is what I call a home. All around it are houses that come and go.

Doesn't anyone notice that the only structures standing on barrier islands after a hurricane are large concrete condos, ICF homes, and domes on a ground-level concrete foundation? Insurance companies are taking notice and adjusting premiums accordingly.

Good question, but the answer blames the idiots who sealed the dome by shutting all the doors, then putting all those poor people under so much pressure. That roof blew out, not off, and it was just a hatch and the elastic membrane sealer--the skin. A hurricane brings very low air pressure. A dome roof is not designed to resist pressure from the inside. The bigger the dome, the bigger that problem will be, so you leave the doors OPEN.

The only coastal building on the Mississippi coast unaffected by Katrina is the concrete dome coliseum in Biloxi. It did flood and did lose some metal skin from the dome roof, but did serve well as an effective shelter, and the internal damage was due to poor planning for the flood waters that were sure to be present in any major hurricane event. The structure proved itself as did the Super Dome.

A round Catholic church with a dome roof didn't do too badly, but what wasn't concrete was stained glass. All of the round water tanks up on tall stilts did well, did survive, and stand like lighthouses as a testament to round. Large debris piles of sticks call our disaster experts and ?EMA professionals a bunch of corrupt and/or ignorant idiots.

Most of the composit box houses that failed might not have had the owners not sealed them tight and locked up prior to evacuating. That presumes no trees fell on the house and no debris caused any structural damage the storm could exploit. That does assume a great deal, but I say if you know you'll get more than two feet of surge, take the doors off the hinges and use them as high shelving to stack items that can't stand getting wet. Do that, and you'll need an interior decorator, not a structural engineer or new home contractor.

Seal it real good and lock it super tight, your home will fill with sewage. If the waters come, water WILL eventually be at the same level inside and out thanks to your toilets and other drains tied in with the sewer. That assumes your flat walls stood the pressure of waiting while being pounded by wind waves. Very few do, but open the doors and most would. Odds are, your wall covering and contents won't be there, but you won't need a framing contractor, and you might keep your roof if the walls hold and stay on the foundation.

Sealing a home might seal a home's fate, whereas opening a home holds open more survival potential, and for everything between total loss and full structural survival, opening can mean the difference between major and minor damage. Yes, you open your home to looters, but the sealed and locked homes are as easy to enter in the looting time. Homes left wide open give the impression that someone is home or nothing of any portable value is. A Fort Knox home begs a crow bar and sledge hammer. If you choose to stay and defend your property, remove your doors or die in sewage.

A sealed cracker box in the surge zone IS a death trap. Any open home surrounded by sealed death traps is doomed. Decisions to stay or go should be made as a neighborhood, united behind one strategy of open doors and mutual defense with a group survival plan drawn from my hurricane survival guide.

In neighborhoods where waterfront homes are up on stilts, don't even try staying because open or sealed, those FEMA compliant structures are doomed and will be a wall of debris mowing down all houses in the path to the new high tide line. You don't want to be there to see that.

If your community isn't hurricane wise front to back, side to side, you are better off leaving it and would be wise to not join it in the first place. For those who return to one that got totally wiped out to simply do the same damn thing again only go a little higher, do us all a favor and stay to ride out the next one. Be sure to shutter, seal, and lock up.

Build smart or die stupid. There is a good slogan I seem to recall from a classic of kinder lit, The Three Little Pigs. Possibly a wolf quote. Might be from the Old Testament. Could be an Almighty God quote. Nathan Hale might have said that. He was good at those catchy one-liner either-ors. If it can't be pegged and nobody claims it, I said that. You may quote Sonny, The Hurricane Man, and it bears repeating with a personal touch:

What we have done in the past isn't working far worse than it never worked before. I have lost faith in the system and feel it is time to abandon those idiots to go our own way. Individual homeowners must be their own emergency managers. Let this site be your hurricane center. I hope to make this place a resource using the Domino Scale. One day, the system might make it a resource, and one day OJ will find the real killer, possibly while shaving.

Until intelligence returns to rule, investigate the home building alternatives available to us today. As a former dome owner and builder I can recommend Good Karma Domes, Monolithic Domes, and highly recommend American Ingenuity Domes. For lovers of the box, the very wise and affordable ICF homes, I refer you to Polysteel and Eco-Block with the understanding that I have no personal knowledge or experience in ICF. Those two look good to me, but a concrete dome looks best to me. Either will survive any hurricane I have ever been in.

Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, each time expecting a different result. I have hurled many inflamitory charges at the experts, mocking the profession and the professionals, but give them their due, at the very least, they are all insane.

From a very early age (13-14) in 1963-64, I studied the martial arts in a day when few were even aware. East and west have diametric opposite ways of combating anything. In the west, we meet force with greater force, and we plow through the opposition with planned overkill and overwhelming fire superiority. In the east, they use the power and inertia of the attack to turn upon the opponent.

Martial art is a defensive art. Our boxing, wrestling, football, soccar etcetera is aggressive. The Japanese defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa is classic passive acceptance with economy of force resistance. Our response to that costly and effective strategy:

NUKE EM!

Our hurricane defense is aggressive defiance (levees and sea walls) or reactionary (just ignore the threat and deal with the mess), but I take the eastern approach of passive acceptance. I become one with the hurricane and go with it.

Dynamic air and water flow with ease past my house. When I mitigate, I anchor my home and open the doors and windows. I use water compatable building materials and employ air traps with water-tight spaces. There is NO fight.

I am not at war with Mother Nature. She is not out to destroy me. If an entire community adopted my strategy, there would be no disaster however big and bad the storm. There will be the seasonal muck-outs and the barefoot sock hops that follow. Who needs homeowner's insurance when your home is virtually indestructable?

If your home isn't a shelter, it is a house, not a home. They don't call it a housing market for nothing, and the down side is a disaster. Let the EMAs manage it, a catastrophe.

For the full story of group survival in the eye of Katrina, read In the Eye of the Storm

Also:

Sonny's other writing:

More Pics of Katrina Destruction

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