There’S a building material that can keep houses intact during hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires. It’S been widely used around the world, but the u.s. lags behind in adopting the construction technique. That’S about to change housing.
Economists will tell you that 77 percent of homes built in the United States are at extreme risk for some type of natural disaster. The East Coast is primarily hurricane. The Midwest is tornadoes which we will also survive, the Rockies and the West, our wildfire plus seismic events. We’Re resistant to all of that there was a record 300 billion dollars in disaster damages in the US and 2017 with devastating fires in the West and hurricanes in the East. Ken Keller is the CEO of rsg 3d, one company that wants to help it’s bringing a building material known as a 3-d semmen tissue sandwich panel to the masses in the US.
Each panel consists of fire retardant foam sandwiched between two wire mesh faces. The two faces are connected with reinforcement wires that run through the foam, and the whole thing is enveloped in concrete. It’S very strong it filled properly and can withstand high winds, earthquakes and even fires. A wood structure will combust almost immediately and studies show that once a wood structure has four or five percent of the building on fire, it becomes a total loss because there’s no stopping the fire there’s no place for a fire in a 3d panel building to start Because you’ve got a concrete, exterior and nothing is combustible within the materials the technology is not new. Nasa has been using a version of its about space craft for years because of its strength and former President Carter used the material in the US for rehabilitation efforts decades ago.
One of the major push for that technology actually was the adoption of the system by our former President Carter, where he used that in rebuilding some of the damaged building that happens in Florida and other places like Georgia, I was supposed through his habitat. Charity engage Habitat for Humanity built with the panel back in the early 1990s and survived Hurricane Andrew without a scratch. Carter’S use of the sandwich panel drew attention to the technology, but it was not clear at the time how to manufacture it on a large scale. But a company in Austria called EDG cracked, the code and created machines to assemble the panel’s, bringing down the cost of manufacturing. Rhg 3d is one of a handful of companies using EDG x’ technology to bring the material to the states for mass production.
Now higher lumber costs, expensive, skilled labor and more demanding building codes are making it an appealing alternative to conventional construction. The reason the product has not been used well in the United States to date is because we have what the United States is blessed with. Multiple forests and wood was an inexpensive building material up until the last five years with the new energy code. You know especially up in the northern states and in California they want Net Zero houses. You cannot get to a Net Zero house construction with what the panels are already in homes all over the world, but experts say that more education and updated building codes are needed for this to go mainstream in America when used properly Caliber says the cost of using These panels is the same or slightly cheaper than conventional building methods.
We have to change the entire dynamic of how we want to build product in the United States and it’s going to have to be this type of technology, because it’s available, it’s effective, it’s efficient and it gives you a much superior product at the end of the Day so we’re not going to have any other choices. This is where the industry is going. You you, you
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