![]() ![]() Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance for Georgetown County (Summary). Can anybody say, re-caulk? I’d be curious to know what the insulating glass unit fabricator would say happens to submerged lites.Breakaway wall means a wall that is not a part of the structural support of the building and is intended through its design and construction to collapse under specific lateral loading forces, without causing damage to the elevated portion of the building or supporting foundation systems.īreakaway wall means a wall that is not part of the structural support of the building and is intended through its design and construction to collapse under specific lateral loading forces, without causing damage to the elevated portion of the building or supporting foundation system.īreakaway wall means a wall that is not part of the structural support of the building and is intended through its design and construction to collapse under specific lateral loading forces without causing damage to the elevated portion of the building or the supporting foundation system.īreakaway wall material shall consist of wood or mesh screening only.īreakaway wall collapse shall result from water load less than that which would occur during the base flood. The Breakaway Wall Certification must be submitted to the Building Department. Doesn’t that give a whole new definition to pressure equalized?Īnd don’t ask about what level of performance the wall is expected to meet after the water recedes. Our immediate thought is to open the doors and let the water pressure equalize on both the interior and exterior. But what if the curtainwall is designed to withstand wind loads that by code are upward of 45-70 psf? What rules, the breakaway loads or the design wind loads?Īnybody know of a curtainwall that will do that: stay on a building during a high wind load event, but disengage and float away under less pressure? And, we certainly don’t want to entertain the thought that the curtainwall stays in place – and for lack of a better description of performance, acts as an aquarium wall that doesn’t let any water through. So we were left with a curious dilemma: some of the info out there says these walls should break away when subject to a force between 10-20 psf. At that 12-foot mark, there were two horizontals, and it looked like they expected the verticals to separate at that point. ![]() The water level was expected to rise up to 10 feet on the first module’s 12-foot height. ![]() Just the perimeter wall at ground level had to fail, while the rest of the curtainwall on the mid-rise building couldn’t be damaged, and had to stay in place.Īs the building would be located on a major estuary, its main floors were elevated a significant distance above the expected flood level. Why the interest? We received a request recently for a “breakaway” curtainwall system that would disconnect from the building during a flood. I’m envisioning the damage from Hurricane Sandy, not all that long ago, or even from the tsunamis that hit Japan and Indonesia. If you’re going to build in a flood zone, the feds want walls that break away and fail if they are caught in the rising water, without damaging the remaining structure. Even the feds have thought about this – they produced a manual called, “Design and Construction Guidance for Breakaway Walls Below Elevated Coastal Buildings,” developed as part of the National Flood Insurance Program. The stairs from the ground level might be carried off in a storm, and if you had a storage room or garage on the ground floor, you might expect some damage there. Outside of wind damage, you’d think the structure could survive an event up to the level of whatever the codes required at the time of design. But, engineers are good at doing that, and they can use the expected flood data from a 100-year storm, or worse. The foundation obviously has to be designed to withstand the action of the water against the structure, with all that dead weight of the building above it. If you have a home in a coastal area, putting it on stilts to raise the main living areas above expected flood waters from hurricanes, makes perfect sense. Or, maybe the question is can they get used to sleeping in a jail cell, with a roommate not of their choosing? While the final verdict on the fire is a couple months off, should the threat of being subject to criminal manslaughter charges be the only motivation for doing the right thing when it comes to bidding, detailing and executing a contract’s scope of work? I hope the people associated with that building can sleep at night. This story claiming last summer’s Grenfell Tower fire spread rapidly via composite cladding panels, crossed the wire last week. ![]()
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