Floating a new idea
Professor has worked for a decade to get world to accept amphibious housing
CAMBRIDGE — The Grand River rushes past Elizabeth English’s office in an old silk factory in downtown Cambridge, only weeks away from spring thaw. But while some may just see a waterway, she sees a laboratory.
Later this year, the river will become a testing ground for an old-school technology the associate professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo hopes can be used around the world in flood-prone areas.
English is leading a team of Waterloo school of architecture researchers who want to build a floating pavilion in a flood zone of the Grand River — the first step in plans to design prototype floating homes for floodprone First Nations communities.
English and her group hope Canada, with help from the National Research Council, can become one of the first countries in the world to allow amphibious homes in our municipal building codes.
That’s significant, because floating housing are still not embraced by insurers and disaster management agencies around the world, she said. English, with her expertise as both an engineer and an architect, has spent 11 years of her life trying to change that.
While retrofitting homes to float is a cheap solution to chronic flooding problems, government agencies still prefer to build homes on stilts, or to relocate communities altogether.
But English argues low-income communities in low-lying areas don’t need to be moved.
“These poor people, who have been living here for generations, don’t deserve to be kicked off the land that is their home. They didn’t cause the flooding,” English said.
“The people who are the most needy, the most vulnerable are the ones who can benefit the most from this.”
English’s team hope to have the Grand River pilot project ready to go in time for a major conference in Waterloo this June. The International Conference on Amphibious Architecture will attract experts in floating housing from around the world, as well as regulators and bureaucrats.
“They want to see this in action. I can show all the simulated models I want, but this will be the real thing,” she said.
Climate change means flooding is only becoming a more pressing problem around the world. Amphibious housing, which homeowners can retrofit themselves using
foam blocks, means communities can better adapt to flood-prone areas, English said.
In the last two decades, 10 of the worst floods around the world have caused damage exceeding US$165 billion, and displaced 1.1 billion people.
In Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says floods, along with storms and hurricanes will cost the federal disaster fund more than $902 million a year.
English became fixated on the idea of amphibious housing in 2006, after watching the devastation from Hurricane Katrina
while doing research at Louisiana State University. She watched U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) try to relocate entire neighbourhoods, and wanted to do something to help.
She created the Buoyant Foundation Project, a nonprofit that promotes the use of amphibious housing in flood plains. She’s working with Canadian communities such as the Kashechewan First Nation in northern Ontario, and studied similar projects in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Jamaica and Bangladesh.
While working in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, one of her students from a rural parish told her his family used floats to protect their fishing shacks. She took the same basic concept and engineered it to meet building codes and be esthetically pleasing.
She’s convinced it’s a better system than building homes on stilts. Elevating homes ruins the “front porch culture” of communities, changes a neighbourhood’s architectural character and doesn’t protect houses in the event of extreme floods, English said.
“Putting a house up on stilts, it’s hugely inconvenient, it looks terrible, and it disrupts the community,” she said. “That’s what got me started after Hurricane Katrina. I saw what FEMA was doing, and I saw how people were resisting. I thought there had to be a better solution.”
The benefit of amphibious construction is that older homes can be affordably retrofitted with floats, called buoyancy blocks, which follow guidance posts when water rises, and return back to the same spot when the flooding recedes.
It costs about a third the price of stilts, she said — about $10 a square foot on the cheap end, and $40 a square foot on the high end. It’s also more accessible for people with disabilities.
But in some states, including Louisiana, federal insurance and mortgage policies prevented amphibious housing from being widely used. English has been pushing FEMA and other agencies to embrace the technology, arguing it makes more economic sense than other alternatives.
Slowly, regulators are beginning to remove some of the restrictions that kept homeowners from building amphibious houses. But there’s still a long way to go, English.
“I’ve been at this 11 years now. Changes like this don’t happen overnight,” she said.