Re:Floating house could ride New Orleans’ floods
by btilly on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:20AM
(#878500)
Someone garbled the reason that the Netherlands has been working on this.
The problem those houses are meant for is not rising sea level - if the dikes get seriously breached the rushing flood water would pose problems that no floating houses could solve. The issue is that global warming is expected to bring increased storms, and therefore larger floods coming into the Netherlands down the Rhine. There is a limit to how quickly that flood water can be pumped out, so sections of the Netherlands have been targeted as temporary floodplains in case of emergency. However all of the Netherlands is fairly densely populated, so there are a lot of people living in those areas.
Therefore effort is being put into designing floating houses, roads, etc for these areas so that people could get by with minimal damage even if they are several meters deep in water.
The problem those houses are meant for is not rising sea level - if the dikes get seriously breached the rushing flood water would pose problems that no floating houses could solve. The issue is that global warming is expected to bring increased storms, and therefore larger floods coming into the Netherlands down the Rhine. There is a limit to how quickly that flood water can be pumped out, so sections of the Netherlands have been targeted as temporary floodplains in case of emergency. However all of the Netherlands is fairly densely populated, so there are a lot of people living in those areas.
Therefore effort is being put into designing floating houses, roads, etc for these areas so that people could get by with minimal damage even if they are several meters deep in water.