(Louisiana Illuminator) - Elizabeth English has always been interested in water. As a child on a farm in New Jersey, one of her favorite games was to turn on the hose and make dams and diversions as the water ran down her driveway. With a background in architecture and structural engineering, Elizabeth came to Louisiana to teach at Tulane’s architecture school, before ending up at the LSU Hurricane Center.
Two years after that move, Hurricane Katrina hit. The more time English spent documenting Katrina’s damage, the more determined she became to find a solution for homes to survive future storms.
“I thought, here I am, a background in architecture and engineering, and working at the LSU Hurricane Center. If I can’t come up with a better idea, then who can?” says English. “I came to the Hurricane Center as a wind researcher and I left the Hurricane Center as a flood researcher.”
She noticed many raised homes floated up with Katrina’s flood waters and remained structurally sound after the water receded, dropping them back onto their foundations. It presented a way to adapt homes to floods, without losing the essential venue for front-porch culture, a drawback of elevating homes above street level in places like New Orleans.
“I realized that this floating behavior, if it could be developed in a purposeful way as a temporary elevation, then you didn’t have to permanently elevate the houses,” she says. “They would be safe if they could float on the water for the period of time that the flood was there and then come back down on its regular foundation just like it was.”
She began working on this idea in early 2006 and soon learned homes were already floating just an hour north of her.
“I have some photographs of a very badly damaged elevated house next door to an amphibious camp that went up and came back down and had no damage whatsoever,” she told me.
But English faced some hurdles developing her work in the area. Because FEMA focuses on moving people away from vulnerable areas, they discourage people from building adaptive homes by withholding insurance from homes that are able to float.
Complicating matters more, if a municipality were to issue a building permit for a new amphibious structure, it could lose its good standing with the National Flood Insurance Program, affecting insurance eligibility across the municipality. In 2014, FEMA began allowing homes to be retrofitted with some restrictions, but by then English was teaching in Canada, where she had more latitude to pursue her research.
English has since built and consulted on amphibious structures internationally. “There’s much more activity on amphibious construction in Europe,” she explains. “There are people in other parts of the world who are actively working on developing this, but as far as I know, I’m the only person in North America.” In fact, she may be the only person in the world who focuses on retrofitting old homes to be amphibious.
English’s dream has always been to focus on lower income homes in South Louisiana, which she fell in love with during her tenure at LSU.
As a professor emerita at the University of Waterloo in Canada, English can spend more time back home in Breaux Bridge, where she has kept a residence all these years.
Now that some FEMA hurdles have been cleared, she is working to secure grants for a prototype amphibious retrofit in Louisiana through her organization Buoyant Foundation Project.
“We need to learn to work with nature instead of trying to fight with the environment. Let water do what it wants to do,” she says. “We need to learn to accommodate water instead of trying to control water and make it accommodate us.”
