brah on god I cant hurt my back and head and big rekd my truck hers my note from my chynaaa-town!!! doc
I will likely mangle some of the building - architecture naming conventions in this post. On the Top - Attic level, there is the long lateral and then two short laterals with each coming off the long lateral at 90 degrees. Are the two short laterals supposed to be used like Cupolas for venting - circulation purposes or are they decorative to break up the long lateral? I think that cupolas were a thing decades ago on some houses in Texas, but then there was some shifting to roof turbines for venting attics.
Not exactly Houston, but since this is where the active conversation is... Video at the link. Drainage project could help Galveston after sunny day flooding leaves neighborhood underwater GALVESTON, Texas (KTRK) -- On Galveston Island, flooding is a usual occurrence during hurricanes and stronger rainstorms. However, one neighborhood on the island can flood even on a sunny day, leaving residents stuck in their homes due to impassable, flooded roads. As ABC13 Meteorologist Elyse Smith explains, a proposed storm pump in the area could bring long-awaited relief to residents near Avenue Q, 59th Street, and Sadalia. Alex Porretto is the Galveston City Councilmember for District 4 and lives in the neighborhood that will benefit from the South Shore Drainage Project. The project will put a storm pump near Offatts Bayou along South Shore Drive to help prevent floodwaters from getting back up through the local storm sewer system. This is how streets flood even when the weather is quiet. It happens more than you may think, gaining the name "sunny day flooding." Porretto said flooding like this is at its worst typically in the spring, noting that the neighborhood experienced 60 days in a row with street flooding from high tides one year. Sunny day flooding, also known as high tide flooding, could also have a larger impact on communities along the Gulf when considering sea level rise. It's what happened during Tropical Storm Alberto. The storm was hundreds of miles away in the Bay of Campeche, but Alberto's wind field expanded hundreds of miles and brought high tides to the Texas coast. Galveston experienced a high tide of about two feet, but that was enough to fill some streets with stormwater to the point of being impassable. Unlike previous flood projects in the area that didn't, the South Shore Draining Project is expected to help prevent that from happening. "Street projects that are supposed to be the fix all and it's not, and it kind of turns into this next project, next project sort of deal. One of the big things I emphasize with this pump station is its efficacy," Porretto said. The South Shore Drainage project has an estimated cost of $59 million. The price tag keeps floodwaters from filling streets during high tide or that everyday rainstorm. The project goes up for bid on July 30, with construction set to begin in 2026.
This is why you have a 4x4 in Houston. This and ‘grass hopping’ to get over to the feeder when the freeway is backed up.
...but what happens after somebody with a 4X4 gets through a tough stretch of flooded road? Retail Businesses will either be shutdown or have limited staff because not enough employees have 4X4 vehicles to keep Metro Houston Up and Running. The Distribution systems for groceries and fuel will have the problems of getting employees in for work and then getting trucks out on the road to make deliveries to locations that could have staffing problems. On the Monday that Beryl hit, I had candy for Lunch and cookies for Supper. I still didn't have power at mid day Tuesday and wanted a better meal than I had on Monday. So I got on the road to find something that was open. In my area, traffic lights either didn't work or were flashing red for all directions. Drivers were frustrated with everything and some (many?) weren't following the normal courtesies for a Four Way Stop. I stopped at a Whataburger and then went home. Maybe I could have done better than a Whataburger, but didn't have the confidence that I could do additional driving without getting hit at a Four Way Stop. So whether there are flooding problems or Electricity problems, things become limited on what is possible when Metro Houston has bad stuff happen to it.
The lateral stacked roofs as you call them are for ventilation. They are stacked roofs with vents at the ends. The way this works is hot air rises up into the roofs and there are vents under the eaves of the upper roofs. As the hot air leaves through the vents more air is pulled up from below setting up air circulation through the house.
Aesthetics wasn’t a huge concern in. This design as it was more about the concepts. If this were to go on to be a real project would consider some more Aesthetics
I mean, that's beside the point. A 4x4 is going to get you out of situations that a normal car won't. Something I thought when I ventured out after the storm to get gas was these fatties ain't gonna feed themselves. Maybe I'm crazy, but aside from the stuff we cooked on our gas stove, which I understand not everyone has, and top of the stuff we ate soon after like leftovers, lunch meat and dairy, we had plenty of non-perishable food like bread and peanut butter in our larder to last for a while. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess you can go down the rabbit hole to long-term outage where people have to bust out their Road Warrior gear and wear a gun, but you're still going places in a 4x4 that your neighbor in their Lexus coup ain't.
I didn't mean it in the sense of visually unappealing but it looks scary like the house would fall over lol
I thought about it this morning and I should have just described it as a short lateral bisecting the long lateral. From your description, it appears that there will be venting from the short lateral as well as from the long lateral. So the short lateral also serves a purpose beyond being decorative and/or breaking up the blandness of just a long lateral. I already understood about the venting and air circulation since I had mentioned cupolas in the earlier post. A cupola's open vents (louvers) allow the air to escape. Cupolas would also allow natural light to brighten the dark reaches of a barn's vaulted ceiling. Today, cupolas placed on barns, homes, and garages can be functional, decorative, or both
I understand about a 4X4 being able to get one out of bad situations, but being at home might be safest place for most people to be unless their home is flooded. I have many more people just staying at home for a day or two rather than buying a 4X4 that they won't need that often (for at least the next several years). Longer range, the design and construction of homes in US Coastal areas will need to change because the cycle of Building in flood prone areas Flooding Rebuilding the house in much the same way as it was originally built is getting expensive Because of minimal elevations across much of the country, the Netherlands might be a guide for what will eventually need to be done in certain areas of the US. Here is one example of the Dutch exploring possibilities. How to build a climate-proof home that never floods The Netherlands has found an ingenious way to combat rising water – build housing that does the same Could climate change-resistant homes help solve the housing crisis? The Met Office’s conclusion was unequivocal. There is “no doubt” climate change played a role in the record-breaking temperatures that fried the UK and northern Europe last month. But there was an irony in this year’s latest heatwave too. The scorching heat that sparked fears of buckled train tracks and made many of us yearn for rain was a symptom of a gradual shift that isn’t just raising temperatures but is making flooding more likely too. The UK Climate Projections 2018 warn that coming decades would see a triple whammy of rising summer temperatures, rising sea levels and more extreme weather such as flash floods. In time, these patterns will fundamentally change where we live and the homes we live in. Many of us already face an uncomfortably high risk of flooding. More than one in 10 of the new homes built in England in 2016-17 are in areas the Environment Agency deems at risk of flooding (it estimates they face at least a 1% chance of flooding every year). Over time, those aren’t great odds. Yet the agency recently warned that “we can’t win a war against water by building away climate change with infinitely high flood defences”. Instead it is calling for housebuilders to construct homes that are more flood-resistant, for example by adding watertight flood doors and thicker, more waterproof membranes in the walls. This sort of technology is getting better. Much of it comes from the Netherlands, where they know a thing or two about flood defences. There are also things that can be done to make homes more resilient in the event that the worst happens, and flood waters do get in. Schoonschip, a floating home project in Amsterdam. Photograph: Isabel Nabuurs As anyone who has endured the horror of a flooded home will tell you, one of the biggest expenses in the aftermath is replacing waterlogged wooden flooring and joists and sodden electrics. Housebuilders can mitigate these risks fairly easily, by installing concrete floors and routing power cables as high as possible. In the long term, such building techniques will become increasingly mainstream. By the 2080s up to 1.5m homes in England will be in areas at significant risk of flooding, according to the Committee on Climate Change. But a more radical change to the way we build homes could deliver a more immediate benefit – by helping tackle the housing crisis. Building homes that aren’t just resistant but immune to flooding could allow developers to build safely on land currently dismissed as unviable because it has a high flood risk. Opening up swaths of extra land for development, especially in the most densely populated parts of the country, might even give developers a fighting chance of meeting the government’s target of building 300,000 new homes a year. The most tried and tested way to build in flood-risk areas is to lift the house off the ground. Humans have been building homes on stilts for millennia, and this technique is still popular in south-east Asia, Central America and Brazil More modern techniques include building on a raised platform like a beach house – a familiar sight in my wife’s native Australia – or simply on banks of earth or concrete. Of course this approach requires an element of second guessing: you need to build the accommodation above the level any floodwater will reach. But the latest technology solves this problem: houses that float and rise with the floodwaters. Ingenious Dutch architects – where else? – have designed houses that have a buoyant, air-filled concrete base instead of conventional foundations anchoring them to the ground. Some are intended to float full-time and are bound together to form floating communities that sit atop the water of a lake. Others are amphibious, designed to sit on terra ferma most of the time but able to float safely in the event of flooding, albeit with copious moorings to prevent any relocation. Such technology comes at a price. Amphibious houses cost about 20% more to build than a conventional design. With prices falling in some parts of the country and builders seeing their margins squeezed, persuading them to build more expensive homes won’t be easy. The clincher could be the land question. A combination of strict planning rules and “landbanking” – developers’ habit of buying but not building on land – is driving up prices in many parts of the UK. By contrast, floodplain land is cheap. So technology that enables homes to be built safely in areas that were previously off limits could make business sense for private developers and spur the construction of thousands of affordable, unfloodable homes. Other parts of the property industry would need to get, ahem, on board. Insurers will want to be sure of the houses’ immunity to flooding, as will mortgage lenders. But both serve conventional homes in flood-risk areas, so there’s no reason for them to eschew homes that cannot flood, no matter how high the water rises. This won’t magically solve the housing crisis or eliminate all flooding risk. As climate change steadily puts more conventional homes at flood risk – whether from tidal surges, or rivers and drains overflowing – the UK needs to continue investing in flood defences. But if we’re willing to embrace the new technology of floating and amphibious houses, we can unlock tracts of cheap floodplain land that could be used for some of the new homes Britain needs so desperately. As the Environment Agency says, we can’t out-build the flood risks of climate change. But if we’re canny, we might just turn some of the threat into an opportunity.
Floating houses are an interesting idea but there’s many challenges to them. The foundation / float part of the house is one but more than that is how to get services to a building that moves. Also in a flood rising up and down isn’t just the problem but so would lateral movement. If the building isn’t anchored in a flood the building would likely be displaced causing other damage.
I thought about it some more and you are right about properly doing the tethering for utilities and anchoring to control lateral movement won't be an easy feat to accomplish. Perhaps there aren't enough benefits for a floating house compared to one built on stilts like beach houses.
Have requirements - expectations from insurance companies for those areas been raised so much that having the house built so far off the ground is the only way to get it insured?
I will use the Home Depot on Sam Houston Tollway @ Bellaire as an anchor point since it isn't that far from his friend's house off of Bellaire and West of the Tollway. That Home Depot is six miles or somewhat more from the neighborhoods that you mentioned. So sort of close, but with some differences. Will insert this so others won't need to look it up. A detention basin/pond temporarily stores stormwater runoff. The basin is designed to manage stormwater runoff by storing it and releasing it gradually until completed drained. Unlike a detention basin, a retention basin or pond is designed to permanently hold water. There is a large pond/basin behind the Home Depot and another just North of the Westpark Tollway between Eldridge and Highway 6. They appear to be connected via Brays Bayou and probably are being used to control/moderate flooding for nearby areas. I think that there is a gating setup for the Basin off of Eldridge while I don't know if the Basin behind the Home Depot has something similar. I scrolled a map higher (North) and looked for similar setups to retain storm water in the area between Westheimer and I - 10 which might have Buffalo Bayou as a major part of the local drainage setup. I didn't see anything similar for your area East of Highway 6. It appears that the continued development in Katy has started to strain the retention capabilities of George Bush Park (West of Hwy 6), so no relief for West Houston. Until They come up with a plan to retain more storm water in that area between Westheimer and I - 10, elevating houses might be the only viable way to use certain tracts of land in that area..
