From houses on self-raising stilts to floating escape pods, there are lots of insane ways to protect yourself from flooding. So, let’s grab our waders and head into the storm, as we explore some ingenious anti-flood inventions that perform the impossible!
Mose: Venice's Flood Barrier
You can’t talk about floods without mentioning Venice, the Italian city that was built on the water! Venice sits on wooden stilts in the Venetian Lagoon; a partially enclosed bay that’s connected to the Adriatic Sea with 3-inlets.
The lagoon has fluctuating tides, and most winters, the city goes through a period called “Acqua Alta”, where high-tides cause widespread flooding. This usually lasts for just a couple of hours, and historically Venetians have dealt with it by building temporary boardwalks above the water level so they can go about their lives.
However, rising sea levels caused by climate change have made
Acqua Alta far worse, resulting in deeper and longer-lasting floods that cause severe damage. Since 1872, there have been 324 floods in Venice that have been classed as ‘very intense events’ where the water-level has increased by around 4.5ft. But 187 of them have occurred in the last 30-years! So as water levels continue to rise, the city really is at risk of sinking beneath the waves, which is why in 2003, Venice’s government started to build MOSE.This
giant anti-flood system sits in Venice’s 3 inlets, and it’s designed to hold back the sea during high-tide and stop the city from flooding. The barriers normally sit flat on the seabed, and their hollow bodies are filled with water to weigh them down. But when there’s a flood warning, compressed air is pumped into them through underground tunnels. This pushes the water out, which allows the barriers to float to the surface and reach their full height of 95ft to block more water from entering the Lagoon. Each barrier is 65ft wide, which is roughly the length of a bowling lane. But the lagoon’s largest inlet stretches up to 1365ft, and blocking all 3 of them required 78 barriers!
Movimentazione barriere di Chioggia e Malamocco in simultanea - 31 maggio 2020 by Ufficio Stampa Mose In total, MOSE took $8 billion and 17-years to build, and it had its first successful test in October 2020 as it was deployed to stop an Acqua Alta! MOSE worked! However, the system needs a full 48-hours’ notice to be activated. So, when an unexpected flash flood hit Venice in December 2020, it was too late to deploy the multi-billion-dollar system and the city was severely flooded. This shows that while the expensive barriers can work, they aren’t particularly efficient, and most Venetians agree that MOSE is a temporary solution that’ll only last a few decades as the sea-level continues to rise. Still, it’s hugely impressive, and even if it isn’t a permanent answer to Venice’s flooding problem, hopefully it’ll buy them enough time to find one! We really don’t want Venice to end up sleeping with the fishes.
Tsunami Escape Pods
In cases of light flooding, you can handle the situation by jumping in a boat, or strapping some plastic stools to your feet and going about your business! But these methods won’t stand up against the most devastating floods, like the kind caused by tsunamis.
These giant waves are caused by Earthquakes and other underwater explosions, and they’ve been recorded to reach up to 1,720ft tall. They’re powerful enough to tear up trees, pull buildings from their foundations and cause catastrophic flooding, so no flood barrier is tall or strong enough to fully stop these natural disasters. As a result, several companies have started developing “Tsunami Escape Pods,” that allow you to float away from the giant waves instead.
地震と津波から身を守る防災シェルター【ノア】.wmv by teamgensou
The “Noah Disaster Shelter” is a reinforced, buoyant sphere developed by the Japanese company New Cosmopower. Their pod is made of strong fiberglass to withstand hits from debris floating in the water, and inside it has space for four people. It’s just 4ft in diameter, so it’s pretty cramped. But at $3,900 the invention is very affordable, and I think that’s a reasonable price to avoid being flattened by the ocean! However, if you’re prepared to shell out a bit more for your anti-tsunami shell, the “Survival Capsule” is an alternative model that’s far more comfortable. The
$15,000 pod was invented in Seattle, and it has comfy seats with seatbelts, a reinforced aluminum frame, and the same insulation that NASA used on the Space Shuttle! The pod will always stay upright, thanks to 20-pint water bladders on the bottom that keep it afloat, and it also comes with surround sound speakers and a toilet. That survival pod sounds cozier than my apartment!
The capsule has also been tested in extreme conditions. The designers have subjected its water-sealed door to 40,000lbs of pressure to ensure it won’t buckle or leak, and they even pushed it over a waterfall in 2020. The invention has come under some criticism from experts, as if it gets stuck beneath underwater debris it’s unlikely that a rescue-team would be able to open the pod and free the occupant. So in the event of a tsunami, getting to high-ground by climbing a hill or tall building is always the best course of action. But if you’re elderly or disabled you might not be able to flee the flood, and in these cases, hopping in the capsule is a great way to increase your chances of survival! Then, once the tsunami subsides, its built-in GPS locator will allow rescuers to find you while you get comfy and listen to your favorite tunes!
G-Cans Project: Tokyo’s Underground Flood Defense
A flooded house is a terrible personal tragedy, but when an entire city floods the consequences are even more devastating. So, some cities have put serious effort into their flood defenses, and one of the largest in the world sits underneath the streets of Tokyo, Japan. This vast underground tunnel network is the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, or the G-Cans Project for short.
When heavy rainfall or typhoons cause Tokyo’s rivers to overflow, channels in their banks divert the surging waters through inlets that lead to the G-Can’s five underground water-tanks, that are 230ft-deep and 100ft-wide. This water then runs through passages to reach a 580ft-long, 59ft-high chamber called the Discharge Tunnel. This cavernous space contains four gigantic jet engines that pump the water down the tunnel and into an outlet that leads to the Edogawa River. The engines can pump 200-tons of water through the tunnel per-second, which means they’re powerful enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in just over four seconds!
Tokyo's Flood Prevention System - Inside the Metropolitan Outer Area Underground Discharge Channel by KEN Tokyo Tour Guide The system was built between 1993 and 2006 and cost nearly $3 billion, but since then, Tokyo’s surface is kept dry during floods as all the water is seamlessly pumped underground. Tokyo are pretty proud of their system, and incredibly, when the tunnels aren’t in use the public are allowed inside for guided tours.
The Glory Hole, Monticello Dam
Every engineer and beaver knows that if you want to hold back a huge amount of water, you should build a dam. But even these giant water-stopping walls have their limits, and when the water-level gets so high that it threatens to overflow, the only thing preventing a complete disaster is the dam’s spillway!
These flood-preventing systems let excess water drain safely away from the dam when it reaches a certain height, like the overflow hole in a sink. They come in all shapes and sizes, from water-slide style chutes to enormous gates in the dam itself. But one of the most interesting examples in the world is found at the Monticello Dam in Lake Berryessa, California, and it’s affectionately known as the “
Glory Hole”.
But how does this big waterhole work? Usually, the water level at Lake Berryessa sits below the Gloryhole at around 430ft, and the spillway’s 72ft-wide opening dries out in the sun. But when heavy rainfall causes the water to rise above 439.96ft, the Gloryhole acts like a giant plughole, taking in the excess water and sending it down a 200ft-long pipe to the nearby Putah Creek. Since the Glory Hole was built in 1957, it’s been used 27-times. This might not seem like a lot, but if a dam overflows it can cause catastrophic flooding, and if the Monticello Dam ever breached, it’s estimated that the nearby City of Winters would be under 40ft of water in around 15 minutes. So, the 27-times that the spillway’s been used has potentially saved thousands of lives, and we should all be grateful that Glory Holes exist!
Floating Houses
You know the phrase if you can’t beat them, join them? Sometimes that applies to floods too, and if you can’t hold back the rush of incoming floodwater, it can be better to go with the flow. The Buoyant Foundation is an organization that builds floating houses for impoverished communities that regularly deal with flooding.
For example, they worked with a village on the banks of Nicaragua’s Malacatoya River to build
Casa Anfibia; a custom bamboo-cabin that sits on top of large, buoyant plastic barrels. When heavy rainfall causes the river to flood the barrels will let the hut float on top of the water, and guidance posts are fitted and fixed to the ground to ensure the houses don’t drift from their original position while they surf.
Casa Anfibia Animation by DrECEnglish The Buoyant Foundation uses recycled materials, so their huts are extremely cost effective. But they aren’t the only people who’ve decided to rise above floodwater. In 2013 Baca Architects took this idea to another level, quite literally. They were tasked with building a house on a plot of land on an island in the middle of the river Thames which floods almost every year.
Nearby houses are raised off the ground on stilts, which is the easiest, cheapest and most common way to prevent a house from flooding. However, local planning laws prevent buildings from being built too high for aesthetic reasons. In order to get the desired amount of indoor space whilst obtaining planning permission, the solution was to create an
amphibious house. Basically, they build a watertight concrete box on the base of the house, which is within a bucket that is allowed to flood. When the river level rises it fills inside the concrete container and then like a bucket floating in a bath, the main house rises. The whole house is guided by mechanisms called ‘’dolphins,’’ which keep the structure level as it rises.
YouTube Video by Unknown At the bottom of the structure is the basement which provides for additional living space that wouldn’t be possible to achieve given local planning laws. When the area floods, the house simply floats above it! Utilities and service pipes can extend by up to 3m so the owners can live in the house during the flood as normal.While that is cool, another British company called Larkfleet Group has developed a more high-tech version of the concept. In the event of a flood, Larkfleet’s “Elevating House” will raise itself by 5ft on a set of stilts in just 5-minutes.
The house is jacked up using an electric motor driving mechanical jacks. To reduce the risk of this failing to work the house is meant to be jacked up well ahead of arriving flood waters, based on advanced warnings from organizations such as the environment agency which can usually predict floods usually at least a week ahead of time. You can lift the house with the flick of a switch to keep your possessions dry, and the home uses flexible gas, water and sewage pipes to stay connected to public utilities while it’s raised.
Still, the homeowners aren’t supposed to stay inside the lifted home, and they’re actually meant to move into temporary accommodation until the floodwaters recede and the house is lowered. That’s pretty disappointing, and if you owned the Elevating House, you'd probably use it to live in a permanent tree-house and lord over your neighbor. Unfortunately, this fantasy will have to wait, because while Larkfleet Group built a test-model of the
Elevating House in 2018, the product still isn’t available to the public.
Austria's Mobile Flood Walls
In 1991, torrential rainfall caused the Danube River to rapidly rise and break its banks, resulting in devastating floods in Austria and Germany. Over 100-people lost their lives, and it was considered a once-in-a-century disaster. But in 2002, more heavy rain caused another flood from the Danube that inflicted $26 billion of damages in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic.
After the flood subsided, each country decided ‘enough was enough’, and built a system of flood walls along the banks of their rivers to prevent future disasters. Austria’s version was the
Machland Dam, a 22-mile-long flood wall along the Danube, from Mauthausen to Sankt Nikola.The majority of the system consists of walls made out of dirt, but the most impressive section was built in the town of Grein, which sits right next to the Danube. At a glance, it just looks like a regular wall, but the whole thing sits on top of an underground barrier that prevents floodwater from seeping into the ground and travelling underneath the defenses.
Then up on the surface, the barrier consists of a permanent 3ft-tall concrete base, and a set of removable metal planks that are suspended between metal posts. The posts and planks can be installed or removed incredibly quickly, allowing engineers to rapidly build the barrier up in the event of flash flooding, to a maximum height of 12ft!
The walls were completed in 2012, which was just in time, because in June 2013 there was yet another massive flood which caused the Danube to burst its banks. The floodwater peaked 2-inches below the top of the extended wall, so it would’ve destroyed the town. But thanks to the barrier, the Danube was denied and Grein was completely undamaged.
Geodesign Barriers: Mobile Flood Defense
In areas where flooding is rare, towns and cities might not invest in permanent flood defenses. So when unexpectedly heavy rainfall occurs, the locals need to deploy temporary flood walls to protect them, like these Geodesign Barriers.
The barriers are composed of interlocking metal panels covered with a sturdy tarpaulin membrane, and they come in multiple sizes. The Elemental model is the smallest at 2ft-tall, and they’re light enough to be set up by a single person. But they’re relatively small and made of thin steel sheets, so for bigger floods, you need Geodesign’s Heavy Duty model. These have much stronger frames made from galvanised steel that can handle impacts from strong currents and debris. But, they stand at up to 8ft tall, so they need a whole group of people to set them up, and in 2018 the system was put to the test. The Intracoastal Waterway is a 3000-mile-long network of rivers and canals that stretches along America’s East coast, and in 2018, torrential rain caused by Hurricane Florence caused it to overflow in South Carolina. Three homeowners in Myrtle Beach called Geodesign for help, and the company sent out a team to set up their Heavy-Duty barriers around the homes. The barriers locked together to encircle each house, and when the flood rolled in they successfully held it back, saving the families more than $100,000 in damages.
Flood Protection in Action The Geodesign Flood Barrier Solution in Myrtle Beach, SC by Geodesign Barriers That’s pretty impressive, but the barriers have also been used to protect entire towns. In February 2022, the River Severn in Britain was predicted to flood, so, Geodesign barriers were installed on its banks through the English town of Ironbridge.
Flood Defense in Action: The Geodesign Barrier in Ironbridge by Geodesign Barriers The barriers lined the sidewalk to contain the river, and they successfully protected homes, cafes and pubs as it flooded. This allowed the Brits to drink their pints in peace, while proving that, unlike the Pokémon, these Geodudes definitely aren’t weak against water!
Floodgates
Gates are typically designed to protect your home from intruders, but today, you can fit your house with one that’ll keep floodwater out too!
Hochwasserschutz Reitthaler GmbH - halbautomatisches Klappschott by Hochwassersicherheit
Meet the
Reitthaler Hinged Bulkhead; a gate that automatically raises into a barrier during a flood. The Bulkhead usually lies flat on the ground, but if it floods, the water flows through a grate in front of it into a water tank. When this tank fills to a certain level, it activates a gas pressure cylinder that closes the barrier, automatically protecting your house without using any electricity! When the water level falls, the tank empties into the sewers and a crank is used to lower the barrier and return your bone dry driveway to its original state.The
Aggeres Self-Closing Flood Barrier is a similar device that’s even simpler, because it doesn’t require the gas cylinder. The device features a barrier stored underground, and a grate at ground-level. During a flood, the grate takes in floodwater and sends it into a hollow compartment underneath the barrier. As the water level in the compartment increases, the pressure pushes the barrier upwards, where it’s ready to stand against the encroaching flood.
Aggeres SCFB - self closing flood barrier by Aggéres Flood Solutions It’s been successfully tested against simulations of incredibly strong storms, and it can be placed anywhere that’s at risk of flooding; whether that’s an underground parking lot or a riverbank. In fact, it’s currently used to protect the National Archives in Washington, D.C, where they store records from Congress and the Supreme Court. This version is 26ft tall when fully raised to ensure these important documents don’t get water-damaged, and it’s just as well the invention is fully automatic.
Temporary Protective Enclosure
When all your flood defenses fail and water starts pouring into your home, you need a last-ditch solution to protect your belongings! The ClimaGuard Temporary Protective Enclosure is essentially a giant anti-flood bag that’s made of military-grade polyethylene plastic.
Protect Your Home Goods From Flood Damage Using ClimaGuard by ClimaGuard Stuffing your valuables into a waterproof bag might seem quite basic, but the enclosure can resist up to 3ft of standing water and keep your possessions dry for the duration of a flood. Furthermore, the polyethylene material is incredibly buoyant, so as the flood rolls in the bag will float on top of it, keeping your belongings away from debris floating under the surface! The ClimaGuard isn’t only made for family photos, and the bag is so large and sturdy that you can actually drive your car into it to save it from the flood. This will keep your car dry, and the bag is buoyant enough to make your vehicle float above the floodwater and underwater debris too!
How to Protect your Car from Flooding - ClimaGuard by ClimaGuard The ClimaGuard’s inventor Rahel Abraham actually came up with the idea after her car was flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. She started developing it to save other vehicles from the same fate, and today, the device has been perfected, and you can buy one yourself for $400. That might seem expensive, but it’s nothing compared to the cost of replacing a car, so if you live in an area prone to flooding it’s probably worth it!
Flood Barrier
The simplest solutions are often the best, and if you want to stop water from entering your home, the first step should be to block your front-door. The Dam Easy flood barrier offers the easiest way to do this, as the watertight gate allows anybody to make any doorway completely flood-proof.
Dam Easy Flood Protection Barriers by Dam Easy Flood Barriers The gate has extendable sides, so you can increase its size to block doorways between 31in and 43in wide. Then once it’s in place, you use a built-in air pump to inflate a rubber tube around the outside of the barrier, creating a watertight seal that will lock it in the doorway. If you need to block a larger entryway, you can place several barriers side-by-side and use the pump to seal them together, letting you protect your garage as well as your front-door! It only takes five minutes to set-up and doesn’t need any specialized tools, so the device couldn’t be simpler. However, it’s also incredibly strong, and its designers have rigorously stress-tested it to prove that it will hold up against stormy weather and large pieces of debris. Each barrier costs $900, which is a good deal if you’re just blocking off your door.
Will It Hold? Dam Easy Flood Barrier vs. 600mm Storm Surge & Debris – Extreme Stress Test! by Dam Easy Flood Barriers Water-Gate Dam
Let’s move onto the Water-Gate Dam, an innovative flood-defense from a company called MegaSecur. This barrier is essentially a giant canvas bag that you drop in the path of an incoming flood. Then, the floodwater flows into an opening and fills the bag up, causing it to expand and block any more water that flows in that direction.
How the Water-Gate dam works by MegaSecur Two people can deploy a Water-Gate around an entire house in five minutes, so the temporary barrier is the perfect way to protect a building in cases of unexpected flooding. Furthermore, they’re made of flexible PVC plastic, so you can put them on any surface, no matter how uneven it is.In 2013, heavy rains in Quebec caused a lake called the Lac-aux-Truites to overflow and flood the surrounding area. So, one local homeowner contacted MegaSecur and asked if they could save their house. MegaSecur sent out a team who used a giant Watergate to encircle the home, and as the water came rushing in it created a barrier that kept the house bone-dry until the water subsided!
Megasecur Environmental Security | Water-Gate System Saves Home from Flooding! by MegaSecur The biggest version of the dam is 5ft high, but it’ll set you back nearly $20,000 which might be outside your budget. So, when the Mississippi River flooded in 2011, one homeowner who didn’t want to splash out for a Watergate came up with a DIY solution instead. He bought 23 truckloads of sand, and used that to build a 5ft-tall barrier around his house. It saved his home when his neighbor's got flooded, and after the waters receded, his barrier was still standing! Still, it was probably a real pain to remove all that sand, so if your house is ever at risk of flooding, you might consider using the Water-Gate Dam instead!
Boxwall Flood Barrier
During a flood, it’s easy for sewers to get overwhelmed by the amount of water flowing into them through storm drains. So sometimes instead of blocking floodwater and letting it build-up into pools, we need to divert it, and send it along predictable channels to make the crisis easier to manage.
NOAQ Boxwalls are plastic flood barriers that link together to control and re-direct everything from a small flow of water to a massive flash flood. You can connect as many Boxwalls as you need by quickly clipping them together by hand. Then once you’ve deployed your wall the floodwater will go where you command, so you can steer it away from an already overflowing storm drain.
THIS IS A BETTER FLOOD PREVENETION TOOL! | UNITED BOXWALL - FLOOD PREVENTION BARRIER by UNITED GLORY INDUSTRY The plastic walls are pretty light, so you might think they’d wash away during intense floods. However, their L-shaped design means that the weight of the water pushes the barrier’s base towards the ground, and this pressure holds the entire thing in place. The more flood-water, the more pressure pushing down on the barrier, meaning it’ll actually be more secure during heavier flooding.
The modules aren’t meant to be deployed permanently, but they can be used repeatedly whenever a flood rolls into town, and NOAQ say they should last for around 20-years. That being said, each Boxwall does cost $382 and you’ll need lots of them to fight off a large flood. So if you want to build a big enough wall to steer floodwater away from your house, it might cost more than the valuables you’re protecting!
Sandless Sandbags
We’ve used sandbags to fight floods since the 18th Century, because they’re simple, cheap and make a strong seal against the ground. But a company called Quick Dam is trying to bring the concept into the 21st Century and improve it, with the invention of their Sandless Sandbags!
Water Activated Flood Protection | Quick Dam by Quick Dam by ASP
These bags might look underwhelming, but don’t worry, they’re growers not showers. Instead of sand, they contain a highly-absorbent powder that swells up when it comes into contact with water. Each bag starts out weighing just 2.6lbs, but after 10-minutes of exposure to water, it absorbs 3.3 gallons and swells to a massive 32lbs! There’s also a “jumbo” version, which is 4ft long and weighs 35lbs when dry, before absorbing a whopping 8-gallons of water!The powder they contain is much lighter than sand, so you could replace your normal sandbags with the same number of Quick Dam bags, and they’d weigh way less. In fact, one pallet of 880 jumbo sandless bags weighing under 4-tons can do the same work as 71 pallets of regular sandbags, weighing 46 tons. This makes your defenses far quicker to set up, as it requires a single person instead of a whole team of workers! So the sandless bags might look like weaklings when you open the package, but put these bags in some water and they’ll transform into sandless sumo-wrestlers before your very eyes. Good luck getting anything past these guys!
Flood Door
Lots of these flood defenses don’t really go with the aesthetic of many pads, and you could do with something more inconspicuous than a pile of sandbags or a heavy metal gate. Fortunately, you can guard my home with the StormMeister flood door, an invention that’s designed to block floods in style!
Despite looking like a regular front-door, the StormMeister has a hollow chamber around its edge that’s made of stretchy rubber. During a flood, the chamber fills with water and expands, forming a watertight seal between the door and the frame. This seal is able to withstand up to 3ft of water, so it’ll keep you safe even if the flood’s water level reaches your ground-floor windows!
Flood Product Testing by StormMeister.com by StormMeister
One of these doors will cost you between two and $3000, which isn’t cheap. But they’ll protect your home from floods and judgmental neighbors, who’ll have no idea how much you’ve splashed out on keeping splashes out! If you were amazed at these ingenious anti-flood systems, you might want to read about amazing stories of
people who protected their homes! Thanks for reading.
