Text 13098, 47 rader
Skriven 2008-03-17 06:55:16 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 13021 av Björn Forsström (2:203/614.61)
Ärende: Hurricanes
==================
Replying to a message of Björn Forsström to Robert Bashe:

 BF>>> Uhhh....do you think a brick-house would withstand a hurricane
 BF>>> better than a wooden house? Both would collapse.

 RB>> Bullshit.

 BF> Fox have just shown bricks that was drawn out of the walls in houses
 BF> in Atlanta after that "small" hurricane.

Most 'brick' houses in the US are brick faced wooden houses.  The brick facing
comes off fairly easily.  It's fairly common with violent storms (usually
tornadoes)
to find boards or other things - like bricks - driven into or through trees or
telephone poles.

FWIW, in most older towns of the US midwest the brick business buildings are in
fact made of brick and not brick faced.  Having said that, a couple of years
ago a
tornado went through the downtown district of a small town in central Nebraska
(the name escapes me at the moment) and devastated those brick buildings,
levelling
some and damaging all of them.

I was stationed on Okinawa from 1965-1971.  Okinawa is in the Pacific's
'typhoon
alley' and I sat through several of them during my tour there.  High winds and
a lot of
rain.  A couple of interesting things I discovered early on were (a) wind
pressure can
cause window glass to flex and sometimes break, and (b) wind pressure can force
rain
through a concrete block wall that's 8" thick.  There are very few freestanding
wood
structures on Okinawa, almost all buildings there are built of concrete or
concrete block
(which is why most of the sand on the beaches around the island was gone by
1971)
despite the fact that the area is also subject to earthquakes.  In all my time
there I
never saw a concrete or concrete block building (including houses) that had
significant
damage from a typhoon.


--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)