A Floating House to Resist the Floods of Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

A Floating House to Resist the Floods of Climate Change

newyorker.com

20 pointsrafaelc10 comments

You see lots of floating structures in marinas. They're attached to heavy piles, and go up and down with the tide. They're always floating, never resting on the ground. The proposal here is a watertight hull which very seldom floats.

That's a maintenance problem. It has to be kept watertight for years or decades between uses. Modifications to the house have to maintain hull integrity. It's hard to test the watertightness. The experience of Louisiana levee boards indicates the maintenance won't get done. People who have a house like this might have it sink, or worse, sink unevenly and break apart, in a hurricane. Since it's supposed to ride out a storm, it would probably be occupied.

It's too bad that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is getting in the way of adopting this technology:

> she mentions the story of a developer who built an amphibious house in New Orleans, then found himself unable to acquire an N.F.I.P. [National Flood Insurance Program] policy; the building remained unsold until he replaced the amphibious foundation with a traditional one.

There was a floating house for a floodplain on the Thames river featured on Grand Designs: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/20/baca-architects-bouyant-am...

Exactly the same project was mentioned in the article. Maybe next time read it before posting ;-)

Wow. I wouldn’t have guessed that basically strapping styrofoam to the bottom of a house would provide enough buoyancy. I assume this only works for single-story homes, e.g. in the New Orleans “shotgun” style?

Also, how does the plumbing work?

> how does the plumbing work?

Hoses are flexible...

> I assume this only works for single-story homes, e.g. in the New Orleans “shotgun” style?

It works for multi-story buildings as well. This home in the UK has a basement, ground floor, and a loft.[1]

> how does the plumbing work?

"Services are connected through "elephant cabling" – a flexible cable that carries electricity, water, and sewage. For safety reasons, the house only uses electric power and no gas." [1]

[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/15/baca-architects-amphibious...

That’s one of my favorite Grand Designs episodes. They end up having to build a little ferry system to get the construction equipment over the water (which ultimately fails and dumps its cargo into the Thames, necessitating a whole recovery effort).

It’s a different flotation technique though (“boat in a hole”), and much more expensive. I think the breakthrough here is the relatively cheap approach of slapping styro to the bottom of the house and letting it ride. I assume if you were trying to lift a bigger/taller house, you may need to start digging down to find room for all the foam, which starts blowing up the price tag.

"The system was simple and cheap" ... $10-$40 per sqft without labor assuming you are "handy" is not exactly cheap. Presuming most homeowners wont want to do this work themselves it sounds like something that would cost $50-100k for a midsize home. At that cost I'd imagine it would only be installed for more expensive homes where flooding is expected to occur frequently.

That's also about what it costs to raise a house up. I guess with this you're losing a known (and importantly still insurable) quantity constructionwise + not having stuff fall off your shelves in a swell for being at street-ish level most of the time with this floating business. I guess if my house were prone to significant submersion I'd look into it vs always being 10 feet up, but I've also always wanted to live on a boat, so...

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