Mexico: Houses Put to Flood and Hurricane Test
 Verónica Díaz Favela - IPS/IFEJ
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September 05, 2009
| | Elevated house resistant to hurricanes and floods. (Verónica Díaz Favela/IPS) | |
Mexico City - Federico Martínez was born in a land of hurricanes. As a young boy in Mexico he saw the wind uproot trees and roll wooden houses "as if they were shoe boxes." As an adult, he developed a house that can withstand winds up to 300 kilometres per hour and floods three metres deep.
The house created by Martínez, an engineer at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), is a response to the United Nations recommendation that countries should develop housing units that can stand up to severe weather phenomena.
The fourth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. body, warns of an increase in hurricanes as a result of warmer average global temperatures, as well as sea levels expected to rise by as much as one metre by the end of the century.
Martínez developed the new approach at his company, Ingeniería Creativa en Acero (Creacero - Creative Engineering in Steel), with the support of the National Science and Technology Council and the IPN.
"I came up with several designs for building cyclone-proof houses and, for years, for each hurricane that came along, I wanted to see how it affected them," he said.
Growing up in the city of Madero, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico state of Tamaulipas, Martínez saw more than once in the wake of storms that people and animals were killed by stepping on exposed electrical cables or disappeared in the flood currents.
His mission began to take shape in his mind: to find a response to nature's challenge. Since the end of July, visitors to the IPN's Dissemination Centre for Science and Technology (CEDICYT) in Mexico City have seen two prototypes of houses and one storm-proof classroom which also serves as a storm shelter, built by Martínez.
They don't look much different than any other building. But their construction makes them resistant to category 5 hurricanes, the maximum intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which measures wind intensity.
The house "is a cage of steel covered with concrete," Martínez explained.
The prefabricated houses are 42 square metres in size. Each has two bedrooms, a living/dining room area, a bathroom and a kitchen. They also have a dome skylight and small upper and lower windows on the walls.
The specialised windows serve as "a system of air convection; the warm air rises and, in this case, the upper windows are to let the warm air out, and the lower windows are for intake," said Martínez. The windows have a safety film so residents are not hurt if the glass is broken.
The houses were conceived for construction in coastal areas. Fifteen of Mexico's 32 states are on the ocean, and are "very hot, and vulnerable to the effect of hurricanes," Víctor Manuel López, coordinator of the IPN's climate change and sustainability programme, told this reporter.
Along the nation's coasts, "everything that is there - people as well as infrastructure - is vulnerable to hurricanes, floods and rising sea level," he said.
In the south-eastern state of Quintana Roo, on the eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula, "fishing villages have asked for the construction of an eight-kilometre breakwater, and they want to be relocated; some people say the sea level has risen," López said.
To deal with flooding caused by tropical storms, one of the houses Martínez developed is mounted upon pillars 2.8 metres tall.
"The floods pass below the house without damaging it, unless the water rises above three metres, which would be very unusual," said the engineer.
If there is no impending threat of flooding, the area under the elevated house can be used as a carpark or a shaded patio. But it should be left without walls that would impede the flow of floodwaters.
A single-storey, hurricane-resistant house costs approximately 32,000 dollars, and the elevated house costs 64,000, based on one-off construction costs. But the prices would drop by as much as two-thirds once they are mass produced. Construction time would also be reduced.
It took eight months to build the CEDICYT prototypes. "With large-scale production, our capacity would be five minutes to build the steel frame and sheeting for one house," Herón Colín Suárez, Creacero's administrative director, said in an interview for this article.
Prefabrication "will allow them to be built in a very short time, and at any site, even without electricity, because it can be screwed together. It would come with an instruction manual and prefabricated parts, which would make construction a speedy process, and no skilled labour would be needed," he explained.
Creacero is looking for funding to set up a factory. Two machines need to be manufactured for production, and a freight lift is needed, as well as trained staff. The total required investment is about 2.5 million dollars.
In addition to homes, the factory could make materials to build classrooms, hospitals or just about any type of smaller building. One example is the third prototype, on view at CEDICYT, a classroom-cum-refuge measuring six by 15 metres. It is intended for classes, but also to be used as a safe place for people when hurricane-force winds hit.
The prototypes, created to stand up to cyclones, can also resist other extreme phenomena, such as tornadoes, avalanches and earthquakes, according to the engineer.
López said that in Japan they are developing hurricane and flood resistant houses, constructed in Bangladesh.
The advantage of the Mexican model is that it eliminates the major costs of importing technology, he said.
Mexico could face economic losses of up to 1.7 billion dollars from damage along its Atlantic and Pacific coasts during the current hurricane season, insurance companies warned at a seminar held early this year.
According to the National Meteorological Service, Mexico's coastline could see the effects of as many 24 cyclones.
"The government has already streamlined the procedures for shelters with basic services," but "those solutions are intended for towns and cities, not rural communities," said López.
The value of the houses created by IPN and Creacero lies in the fact that they are intended for easy assembly in rural areas.
This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by Inter Press Service (IPS) and the International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), for the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org. |
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