For decades, buildings taller than three storeys have depended on special materials and research to resist destructive windstorms.

Now, for the first time, researchers in London at the University of Western Ontario and in the United Kingdom are going to be able to test houses and smaller buildings.

The Three Little Pigs project will use a full-scale, two-storey house inside a 13,000-sq.-ft. hangar at the London airport. The house will sit inside a steel reaction frame, which provides an area to mount wind-pressure boxes that are 0.6, 1.2 and 2.4 metres square.

The boxes will simulate the effects of hurricane-strength winds on the house.

Peter Tiahur, Business Edge
Prof. Michael Bartlett shows a model of the two-storey house that will be used in wind-tunnel tests to simulate effects of hurricane-strength winds.

"What happens to the house or light-frame building when subjected to those loads?" asks research team leader Michael Bartlett, a structural engineering professor at Western. "We don't really know the answer to that ... we only know that after a hurricane there are match-stick houses strewn everywhere - but that doesn't really tell you what initiated the failure."

The $6.8-million project is getting 40 per cent of its funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, 40 per cent from the Ontario Innovations Trust and 20 per cent from the university.

The project is expected to begin next year when all the pressure boxes have been built and a house is donated, which Bartlett says is in the works.

Cambridge Consultants Ltd., a technology and engineering consulting company in England, is developing the wind-pressure boxes. Another English consulting company, RWDI Anemos, which also does wind-engineering work, is working with Cambridge to test and commission the system.

Bartlett says that once the research begins, the two-year project will bring a house to the point of collapse. After that, a new structure - possibly a single-storey steel building - will be constructed for full-scale testing.

Researchers also will evaluate structural reliability and human error in construction, as well as rainloads - how wind-driven rain affects a house.

Bartlett says the wind-pressure boxes will produce +5 to -20 kilopascals of pressure through a system of two'-way valves that will suck and blow to simulate the real fluctuating nature of turbulent wind. Five kilopascals equals about 500 kilograms for every square metre of roof.

John DeVries, president of the Ontario Building Officials Association, says the project has come at a good time for home construction.

"The National Research Council is looking very closely at what they perceive to be an absence of design in smaller buildings - single-family, two-storey homes," Devries says. "The simple homes of the 1950s and 1960s are gone, prescriptive codes built around them no longer exist."

The federal government is opening the door to change, DeVries says, with an initiative in 2006 to provide more flexibility in building code requirements that will allow for new methods and materials - provided the science backs it up.

Although Canada is not often hit by hurricanes, they do occur with devastating impact, such as in 2003 when Hurricane Juan hit Nova Scotia and Hurricane Hazel in Toronto in 1954.

Bartlett says he and the Little Pig colleagues see the project as a necessity because the global climate has become more intense and extreme.

"Losses to those kinds of events for insurance companies have been doubling every five to seven years since 1950s," says Paul Kovacs, executive director for the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR).

Kovacs adds that the 1998 icestorm that hit eastern Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick cost taxpayers, government and private companies an estimated $5.4 billion.

The ICLR provided more than $180,000 of research seed money to the university to get the project off the ground.

"This (weather disaster) isn't yet a huge trigger that is overhauling all of insurance, but it is definitely affecting you as a homeowner and someone who buys insurance," Kovacs says. "Personal safety has come a long way, but property damage is still high and rising quickly."

Kovacs, who is based in Toronto, started the ICLR, which is a not-for-profit education and research institute, in 1997.

Its goal is to reduce disaster deaths, injuries and property damage through a multidisciplinary approach, Kovacs says.

The Little Pigs project is ahead of the curve, he says, because it is possible to build safer and more resilient houses.

Kovacs says he expects the cost to make safer homes using the Little Pigs research will likely be less than one per cent of the house's total cost, or about the price of adding another bathroom.

The idea of Canadians asking for a disaster-resistant house may sound unusual, but Kovacs says it is not that long ago that energy-efficient houses were also unusual.

Bartlett says the Little Pigs project is doing more than just wind testing. The multidisciplinary project also will measure the moisture in wall cavities to pinpoint the cause of mould.

"Mould is the asbestos of the 21st century," Bartlett says. "It's a huge problem and we don't understand it very well."

(Melanie Chambers can be reached at chambers@businessedge.ca)