Your Flood Proof Home. What makes building water resistant?

Your Flood Proof Home. What makes building water resistant?

5 minute read

With natural disasters happening more and more often worldwide, architects join their efforts with environmentalists and climate experts to come up with solutions that would allow us to maintain balance with nature and build houses that would be safe and sustainable in the face of natural hazards. Creating a Flood Proof Home is one of the leading concepts in this field.

flood proof home

Statistically, floods are the most common natural disaster in the United States. And the most destructive one.

The recent events have demonstrated that, in fact, no region, including central Europe, is immune to flooding. Therefore the solutions that allow to build of flood-proof homes and protect the existing building are as relevant as they might have never been before.

The world economy is already weakened with the Pandemic of COVID-19, and natural disasters, including floods, can be truly devastating for certain areas and communities.

In this article, we shall go through 5 fundamental principles that will help you get a floodproof home or become the mainstream urbanistic streams that will help us make our towns safe and flood-resistant.

Elevated Houses

This is not an innovative approach indeed. People have been building their houses on stilts or even trees for millennia.

You can often see such houses in Asia and other water-front regions, where bungalows on stilts have become a signature architecture. 

Modern architecture offers various innovative variations of those elevated bungalows, adapted for the modern urban aesthetics.

Not only are such buildings safer in case of flooding, but they also allow to utilize the area under them safely, using it as a storage or private parking place, liberating space for a greener, more people-friendly urban environment.

Flood Proof construction materials

The modern market offers innovative flood-proof construction solutions that can help you adapt any project to make it safer in case of flooding from the very beginning.

You can use sealant or build your house on a waterproof membrane. There are special bricks with water pockets that don`t soak flood water, keeping your house safe and dry even during continuous flooding.

You may also want to install the so-called flood windows and flood doors. They are created with an advanced locking and sealing option. They practically allow you to hermitize your house, protecting your property from flood damage.

The wet-proofing principle

This concept of building a flood-proof home may seem pretty confusing, but the practice shows that it may be the future of architecture, especially in areas most prone to flooding.

The idea is to take advantage of water and control its potential damage rather than keep it off the building entirely.

This concept has been fully embodied in a waterfront hospital built in Boston. The architects placed a swimming pool and no-0vital facilities on the floor that is most likely to be affected by flooding.

Another example is the trend to build houses in Asia, specially designed to withstand floods and even tsunamis. Designers choose solid floors, tiles, and other waterproof materials instead of wood and wallpaper for the ground flood of such houses. They also revise the traditional placement of electric infrastructure, putting it close to the ceiling.

Temporary flood protection

The modern market also offers temporary flood protection products that can floodproof your home even if it was not originally built to withstand the disaster.

It is a great solution if you are not the one who builds a house but buy it from a secondary estate market.

Even if the previous owners swear that floods have never happened in the area, the modern climate change and trends that accompany it show that floods may occur worldwide today even if there are now sufficient water bodies in the areas or it is historically considered arid.

Getting a set of temporary flood gates or flood barriers for your property is your guarantee that you will be able to protect your house and make it entirely floodproof within several minutes, even if you don`t have any previous experience in withstanding the disaster.

Waterborne architecture

This architecture concept has appeared in the Netherlands as an attempt to come up with a permanent core solution for a flood proof home. The idea is to build a house with pontoons installed into the foundation and structure to let it simply float in case of flooding.

Although it is still considered experimental, this concept is widely used in Asia's flood-risk regions, and Thailand is coming up with a project of the first waterborne commercial building.

There are also several architecture bureaus in Britain that successfully developing the idea of waterborne architecture, hoping to make it mainstream in the observable future.

Floodproofing your home is crucial if you want to guarantee that your family, as well as your property, will stay safe and manage to withstand one of the most common and destructive natural disasters in the world.

Today you can build your home flood proof from scratch taking advantage of innovative construction materials and architecture solutions, or endure your existing house with flood barriers and gates that would keep water off any passe into the building.

Contact Dam Easy today and learn about our solutions and products to help you make any home or business safe in case of flooding and preserve your health, wealth, and future. With floods happening more often, flood roofing your home becomes essential, just like protecting the property from fires, drafts, thermal and sound isolation, etc.

Floodproofing your home today will guarantee your safety in a disaster that can happen sooner than you imagine. 

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DAM EASY® FLOOD GATE - DOOR DAM    Floods are becoming more common around the world. What was once a 100-year phenomenon is now a seasonal trend that homeowners must deal with.   That’s EXACTLY why you need this Dam Easy Flood… Read More

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