An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/

By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post. 

Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and destroyed more than 2.1 million homes. The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are among the world’s fastest-growing plants. A type of grass, bamboo can be ready for harvest in as little as three years, a fraction of the time needed for timber wood to grow. Like manufactured timber, bamboo products can store carbon, and bamboo forests perform well as carbon sinks, meaning they absorb more carbon than they release. …A crew without much technical knowledge can manufacture and assemble the structures’ eight panels and the interior bamboo beams that support them on-site. Lari designed them so that homeowners can easily make repairs and even additions. “If bamboo is taken care of,” she said, “bamboo can last forever.” If a flood is coming, homeowners can dismantle the structure’s bamboo skeleton from its permanent foundation and move it to higher ground. Bigger buildings, such as community centers, stand on stilts several feet high....

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