Doctorate students at Oregon State University have conducted an experiment to see how houses in coastal communities hold up to storm surge.
The experiment was held Aug. 6 at the Hinsdale Research Lab in Corvallis. It holds the largest tsunami basin in the world, which is capable of multidirectional wave generation.
Researchers from Japan, Korea, and Italy gathered in the audience to watch the demonstration.
Inside the basin were two brightly-painted one-third scale model houses. They were used to measure the difference in flooding impact on elevated and non-elevated structures.
One house sat about three feet higher than the other, up on stilts above the water. Over the course of three hours, researchers increased the height and force of the waves in the basin.
By the end of the experiment, the unelevated house was flooded, missing windows and its entire back wall.
Dan Cox, a coastal engineering professor at OSU, said he hopes the experiment helps change building standards for coastal infrastructure.
“We’re really trying to learn what we need to do to better prepare,” he said, “to either elevate the houses or come up with other means to reduce the risks from these floods.”
The houses are modeled after homes in Southwest Florida that were impacted by Hurricane Ian in 2022. Graduate research assistant Amina Meselhe, who built the houses, said she was inspired by footage of a house in Fort Myers getting swept away by storm surge.
Although the experiment was meant to mimic hurricane storm surge, researchers said the data collected can be applied to other coastal hazards, like tsunamis, that could impact cities in Oregon.
“Actually, effects of waves and tsunamis on houses are very similar,” said Pedro Lomanaco, the Director of the Hinsdale Research Lab.
The data will need to be cleaned, verified, and peer reviewed before it’s published.
“We should have done this 10, 15 years ago,” Lomonaco said. “What we are learning from these experiments could have been done in that amount of time, and then a number of communities would have benefited.”
