Hurricane Wilma Fuels Urgency for Storm-Resistant Homes
22 October 2005
Oxfam America is partnering with TRAC to teach communities how to build hurricane-resistant housing.
As Hurricane Wilma whirls toward the tip of Florida promising more misery to the storm-battered South, Peg Case says the time has come to shift gears and find new ways to make homes safer and stronger in the face of repeated assault from Mother Nature. Case is the executive director of the Terrebonne Readiness and Assistance Coalition, or TRAC, a disaster preparedness and recovery organization based in Louisiana.
"We've been saying the weather patterns would change and go back to the intense patterns like in the 1940s and 1950s," said Case. "Now, it's a reality. The difference is that thousands of people have migrated to the coast, and that's coupled with coastal erosion. We have to rethink land use management and housing. When we rebuild, we need to rebuild better."
In its first major relief effort in the United States, Oxfam America is now partnering with TRAC on a program to educate communities about how to build hurricane-resistant housing. Members of the SIGUS Program of the architecture department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will provide expertise.
A visit to Dulac, Louisiana, in Terrebonne Parish makes the case for improved housing all too clear. Propped in the mud along the Bayou Grand Caillou, countless houses suffered enormous damage when floodwaters from Hurricane Rita washed through in late September. In the days after the storm, sticky sediment coated the yards and mold pocked the walls of homes on streets piled with ruined belongings. At water level, none of the houses stood a chance against Rita.
"This time around we're not going to do it like we did it before," said Case. Instead, she is hoping that design ideas generated by a collaboration between MIT and bayou communities will become the basis for a new way of living in coastal Louisiana.
"We may not be able to build 2,000 new houses, but however many we build, they may become the benchmark."
Community Design
What will it take to come up with a good design? It starts with engaging the community.
"It's not for us to say, ‘Your house is crummy. It's going to flood. Move away,'" said Reinhard Goethert, a principal research associate in MIT's architecture department who will be heading to Louisiana to work with TRAC. Part of the challenge in designing for these coastal communities is acknowledging that people in them are determined to stay—despite the hazards—and then tapping them for their expertise.
"It's our job to treat people as equals. That's very important," said Goethert. "How can we work on this together? This is not the first hurricane they have been through. They have learned something—something that works."
For Case, finding workable solutions means taking a thoughtful look at a community's beginnings. How have people coped with severe storms in the past?
"We need to go back to a reverence of the land," said Case. "The houses built originally were never on the ground. We look around and think, why did we start building on the ground?"
Cost was one factor, she said. It's cheaper to forgo pilings. For new designs to be effective, particularly in rural parishes where poverty is widespread, affordability will be key.
One idea Goethert may explore with TRAC is the concept of a "grow house," a small affordable home that could be constructed quickly and added on to over time.
"A flexible starter house, if you like," he said. Such homes incorporate local materials and local building techniques, and represent a vast improvement over the temporary trailers many people get shuffled into after a storm, said Goethert. Those trailers often become permanent homes, but they are hardly storm-worthy.
Lessons from Banda Aceh
For Goethert, the consulting work he did last summer in tsunami-ravaged Banda Aceh, Indonesia, drove home the importance of engaging a community in its reconstruction. One of the things that mattered most to the residents there was that their homes be familiar—and not some strange import from a foreign place.
The challenge for the architects was to design Indonesian homes that were suitable culturally but that were also strong. And for that, said Goethert, they took their inspiration from the mosques, many of which withstood the force of the tsunami. They were well-built from good-quality materials. The same building principles will be essential for coastal Louisiana's future, too.
But with so many disasters roiling the world at the moment, including the onslaught of powerful hurricanes in the South, one of the biggest casualties may be the ability of government to stay focused on any one disaster for long, said Goethert.
It's going to be up to the communities themselves to provide the stability to recover from terrible storms, he said. And that means strengthened social networks and organized responses on a very local scale.
"Communities have to be more self-sufficient," said Goethert.
"It's time for us all to take responsibility and just do it," added Case.
