safe underground

[miriam_e]

I wonder how many structures that were destroyed in the recent Queensland cyclone (hurricane) will be rebuilt exactly the same way again, waiting for the next winds to knock them down.

Whenever there is widespread damage by winds or bushfires or flood or earthquake I mention to people that most of the homes would have survived if they had been built underground. They tend treat that as an absurd statement. I make all the points I've listed below, but somehow people have this facility for not hearing things that depart from "normal" and they brush it all aside. But what I'm saying isn't new or radical. It has all been shown time after time. Heck, some of the world's foremost architects and energy experts have elected to build their own homes underground. Now, why do you suppose they would do that?

There are a lot of advantages to building underground:

• There are enormous energy savings. The house maintains the same temperature year round, regardless of the external temperature. If the top of the underground house is insulated down the sides to about 2 meters below the surface then the whole house acts thermally as if it is at that depth, where the temperature hardly varies all year. Coober Pedy, here in Australia, can be an inhospitably hot place during the day and can be very cold at night, but the buildings remain at a pleasant temperature because they're underground. Heating and cooling are the two greatest costs in a home and they drop to almost nothing in an underground home.
  
  
• The thermal inertia of underground houses means that once they are cooled or warmed to a particular temperature they stay near that temperature for days on end. The fact that there are no daily swings of temperature make them luxurious places to live.
  
  
• Fire, wind, and most natural disasters sweep over the surface, leaving underground buildings untouched. In the USA, in places threatened by tornados they traditionally have storm cellars, but for some reason I've never been able to fathom, they continue to build mostly above ground. After each tornado people come out of the safety of their storm cellars and rebuild their demolished aboveground homes. In bushfire prone places here in Australia, not only do people build their homes above ground in the path of expected fires, but they build them out of wood! -- out of wood!! Then after the guaranteed tragedy they rebuild aboveground in wood again! Unbelievable! Surprisingly, you'd be safer in a properly constructed underground house during a flood. And I seem to recall that underground housing is safer in an earthquake too. Underground houses are safer in times of unnatural disaster too. In times of war people evacuate to the underground bunkers.
  
  
• Exterior maintenance of an underground house reduces to cleaning windows and skylights. There is no exterior painting, roofs to fix, gutter to clean/repair, and no danger of falling off roofs.
  
  
• You get double use of your land if you build underground. This is especially valuable if you live on a small suburban block.
  
  
• Sound insulation in an underground home is superb. No more worrying about noisy neighbors, or conversely you can play music as loud as you like without disturbing others.
  
  
• Security is better in an underground home than an aboveground one. The only points of entry are the windows and doors, and even if undesirables do enter it is possible to have safe rooms that can't be deduced by walking around the exterior as can be done with an aboveground home. (The comedy Burglar starring Whoopie Goldberg makes this last point, though in that film her home is at the top of a building.)
  
  
• Most underground buildings make great use of natural lighting through windows, skylights, and lightpiping, to become well-lit, airy places, unlike most "normal" houses, which are usually dark and badly lit despite being up on the surface.
  
  
• If everybody built underground ugly suburbia would be transformed into beautiful parkland. (I'd like to see roads move underground too -- the horrific annual toll of child, pet, and wildlife deaths would drop to zero. And forcing drivers to breathe their fumes would produce much faster changes in vehicle emissions.)
  

Drawbacks?

• Underground homes are initally more expensive than aboveground homes, but if you lose everything in a disaster you have to rebuild not only your house again, but also repurchase all the other things destroyed too. And if life is lost then what price can you put on that? But it isn't impossibly expensive, and if more people built that way the price would come down.
  
  
• The ultra-conservative nature of town councils can make it difficult to get building approval, even if the house is provably safer, stronger, more aesthetically pleasing, and more energy efficient.
  

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Please click the image to see greatly.

Somethimes, I love Engrish. I don't know how advanced they are with Alice City, but I don't imagine very far. I've heard so many gradiose schemes in my time, and this stikes me as another. I can't imagine the cost/tonne of dirt moved would be extremely cost prohibitive.

Plus, it makes me think of Umbrella Corp.

I find the underground cities article interesting. Obviously at some point it was considerably more cost effective to design and build underground tunnels and subways. What's changed? Lack of slave labour? Workplace regulations? We're having enough trouble over here just digging a few kilometre long rail tunnel.

I wonder what that ship is from. Doesn't look like Pitch Black to me. Time Guardian maybe?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Engrish... :) Yeah, I used to have a Honda motorbike decades ago and loved the manual. It added much needed humor when faced with the hassle of working on the machine.

What's changed? Perhaps lack of inclusion?

Back in the day, workers earned perhaps 1/20th what the executives did and they had great hopes of a brilliant future for their kids.

Nowadays executive salaries are thousands of times the size of worker salaries and the gap ever-widens. There is a constant feeling of being ripped off every which way, of becoming truly slaves with no future, along with this awful sinking expectation that it is all about to go badly sideways. It's understandably difficult for workers to get enthusiastic about impressive feats of engineering now.

I remember when I was a kid that workers on the Snowy Hydroelectric Scheme felt genuinely proud that they were a part of something truly grand. There was a real feeling of excitement at the gound level.

Seems the spaceship is from Pitch Black. See http://members.cox.net/5barr27/australia/coober/pedy.html for neat pictures and info, and lots of pics of underground Coober Pedy.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

What's changed? Perhaps lack of inclusion?
Back in the day, workers earned perhaps 1/20th what the executives did and they had great hopes of a brilliant future for their kids.

Possibly that's a part of it. Whenever I think of big infrastructure projects I think if things like the London Subway and the like moreso than the Snowy River Hydro, and in terms of those projets I don't believe industrial relations were particularly conducive to getting the best from workers.

Admittedly most of my views are based on documentaries like Industrial Wonders of the Modern World, and various radio doccos I've heard, including one about the Depression-era strikes on the US Waterfront (and the working conditions of that age) which don't instill in me a hot of hope that the workers would be gleeful about building public infrastructure that would serve all.

That said, the Snowy Scheme came later than all that, so maybe there was a golden age of IR.

These days we most often hear about the Perth-Mandurah train line. It's over budget and, while the West beats the story up something chronic, at the heart of it are some dreadful problems.

One 17-year-old working on site gets $900 per week to simply record vehicle movements at the gate. I don't know if that sort of salary disparity with the "average worker" is good for anyone either, much as executive level salaries are good for anyone; or the payscale of wages offered by the mining industry is good for a regional centre like Mackay.

The payscale of executives really bugs me. Even a middling executive of a 2cps resources house can apparently justify a c$300,000 salary.

Seems the spaceship is from Pitch Black. See http://members.cox.net/5barr27/australia/coober/pedy.html for neat pictures and info, and lots of pics of underground Coober Pedy.

If only Chronicles of Riddick hadn't sucked, hordes of geeks might have flocked to Coober Pedy annually.