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Hurricane House
Fri Sep 03, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
From the outside, it looks like a typical, modern frame house on the Outer Banks -- two
stories, light gray, with a picture window and a deck. It's just a few blocks from the
beach -- the kind of house you'd love to have as your summer getaway. Hi, I’m Bryan
Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook.
But this normal-looking house hides a set of 13 pressure gauges, 20 strain gauges,
and a complete weather station. It is one of the world's fanciest tools for measuring
hurricane impact. The Kern-Pitts Center was built by the town of Southern Shores,
North Carolina, with help from the nonprofit Blue Sky Foundation. While the home was
being constructed, a team from Johns Hopkins University was there, wiring the house
with sensors. Their goal is to measure in fine detail what happens when a hurricane's
winds come knocking at the door. The measurements are sent via phone lines, so the
research team can watch from the comfort of their lab back in Maryland, while the
Kern-Pitts House is buffeted by wind, rain and storm surge.
After only a year, the house got its first test from Hurricane Bonnie. Although winds that
struck the house were more than 60 miles per hour, more surprising were the vertical
winds, blowing upward at 25 miles an hour for brief gusts. The amount of pressure
tugging outward on the roof also surprised the researchers. Even in a solid house, one
weak link can jeopardize the whole building's integrity. Hopefully, data gathered at the
Kern-Pitts House will give us a better idea how a build a more hurricane-proof house,
and lessen the impact of the next Andrew or Mitch. Call it … constructive criticism.
The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru of America with major support
provided by the National Science Foundation. We are a program of the Mount
Washington Observatory.
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