Tsunami House

This series of images shows a one-sixth-scale woodframe house being hit by a foot and a half tall wave in the Tsunami Wave Basin at Oregon State University, one of fifteen large-scale laboratories withn NSF’s Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. At full scale, this would equal a 10 ft wave hitting a 2,000 square foot house.

The project is a joint effort between Colorado State University and Oregon State University to determine the wave loads on residential structures that occur during hurricanes and tsunamis. You can watch experiments live via cameras posted at the fifteen NEES laboratories from the NEES activities website. A video showing the recent tsunami experiment is available here, while the press release discussing the experiment is here.

Credit: John W. van de Lindt, Colorado State University and Rakesh Gupta, Oregon State University.