Watch a House Get Annihilated By the Insurance Industry’s New Indoor Hurricane Simulator [Video]

How do you establish how well houses will withstand catastrophic weather? When you’re the insurance industry, you build a $40 million room that will simulate Category three hurricanes. You then huff and you puff and you blow those suckers down.

The Institute for Business & Home Safety, a collection funded by the insurance industry, spent $40 million creating its new state-of-the-art disaster lab in rural South Carolina, a facility which may allow them to find out how various construction practices and materials hold up to catastrophic weather.

To recreate tornados and hurricanes, the lab utilizes 105 gigantic fans (capable of blowing nearly 100mph gusts) and a 750,000 gallon watertank to provide the rain. The simulated hurricanes can cost up to $100,000 each, but, as the WSJ explains, its a worthwhile investment for insurers:

IBHS’s new facility will give insurers the power to rigorously videotape what happens as powerful winds blow over structures. Before, researchers largely depended on wind data from universities or computer simulations and rummaged through damage zones or photographed them from helicopters.

It is ” the last link in a protracted chain of progress in hurricane loss prevention,” said Dr. Louis Gritzo, manager of analysis for FM Global, a larger insurer and one of IBHS’s members. Other insurers fascinated with the research facility include State Farm, Nationwide and AllState.

The above video shows two similarly constructed houses-real deal, full size houses-one of them with $5000 worth of additional structural improvements. I’ll leave it to you to determine which one who is. [ PopSci ]

Music: Paganini’s ” G Minor, Vivace”

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This post is tagged: catastrophic weather, computer simulations, construction practices, insurance industry, tornados and hurricanes, worthwhile investment