Blow me down

Houses can be built on stilts to avoid flooding in the hurricane season, but
many owners fix walls to the stilts to close off the area as storage space. If a
big wave hits, these walls take its full force, which can damage the whole
building, says Spencer Rogers, a coastal engineer at the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington. Instead, walls around the stilts should be designed to
collapse, he says. Rogers’ team tested a range of “breakaway” wall designs in a
tank with waves up to 2 metres high. Plywood panels 6 millimetres thick,
attached to stilts with…