Michael Maisano ACE project

Flood adaptable construction

Humans have been adapting to their environments throughout history by developing practices, cultures and lives suited to local conditions, such as building homes on stilts to protect against monsoonal rains. However, climate change raises the possibility that existing societies will experience climatic shifts (in temperature, storm frequency, flooding and other factors) that previous experience has not prepared them for.

People have been coming up with new ways to prevent these floods, but must use them in the correct way, which must be built the right way in order for the structure to do what it is meant to do. People in Dhaka must work hard after the flood season in order to make sure they are fully prepared and ready for when the flood season comes again.

Dhaka experiences local intense rainfall, huge tans -boundary inflows and cyclone induced surges, and mass flooding that breaches the protective wall that surrounds it. These floods cover 60% of the mainland areas and towns.

After the flooding season is over, the people of Dhaka must work together in order to rebuild many of the structures that were destroyed by flooding. Materials such as bamboo, sand, and sheets of thin steel are used in re-building these destroyed homes. Those materials are all cheap and have a low-quality. Businesses and factories, on the contrary, use better quality supplies such as bricks, cement, rods, steel, concrete for the base and support.

in order for Dhaka to maintain a better city and society, it must use stronger, denser, and thicker materials, just like the ones used by factories, in order to prevent structures being damaged or destroyed by event he smallest flood. As of now the protective wall is only a 5-6 feet. The people must use the materials they have and expand the wall, with better support, to prevent destructive waters from entering Dhaka, and more specifically, Islambag.

For building and homes, cement should be used as a binder material, brick as a filler material, and steel bars as an extra support in the concrete, otherwise know as reinforced concrete.