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Houses can be built on stilts to avoid flooding in the hurricane season, but
many owners fix walls to the stilts to close off the area as storage space. If a
big wave hits, these walls take its full force, which can damage the whole
building, says Spencer Rogers, a coastal engineer at the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington. Instead, walls around the stilts should be designed to
collapse, he says. Rogers’ team tested a range of “breakaway” wall designs in a
tank with waves up to 2 metres high. Plywood panels 6 millimetres thick,
attached to stilts with…