Preemptive Flooding

By Steve Rose
Thursday, October 24, 2002

A great deal of flood damage comes not from the water, but what it carries -- mud, debris, and disease organisms.  Flooding normally comes with some advanced warning.  The idea of preemptive flooding is to use a source of clean water to intentionally flood the interior of a building that is about to be inundated from the outside, with the purpose of equalizing the pressure and keeping as much of the flood water out as possible.  This would be combined with taping as many seams as possible where the flood water might otherwise enter, and being capable of premptively flooding at a rate that matched the encroaching water.  In an extreme flood plain case, it might be worthwhile or necessary to build an external storage tank (e.g. of ferrocement) to have enough clean water, fast enough.

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