The people of Bangladesh have long been living with natural calamities that ravage lives and properties and cause immense sufferings to them. The most common among them is flood, which forces hundreds of thousands of people, almost every year, to leave their inundated homes and take refuge in flood shelters.
Is there a way to end this frequent misery? Indeed, thanks to its ‘Core Bangladesh’ research project, the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) has brought a phenomenal technology to address the issue on a sustainable basis.
A riveraine country, Bangladesh is a land of floods. Evacuation of people to safe homes to save lives and belongings poses vulnerability to the affected people.
So, the research has brought a different kind of home that will allow the people to stay home with all their belongings even amid a high rise of floodwater. The technology introduces floating ‘Amphibious House’ with retrofitted floor, which is innovated with the help of Dutch flood proofing technologies, implemented in the local context.
An amphibious house is built on land and designed to float on water in case the water level rises. The house is built using the principle of buoyancy, according to engineers. Buoyant foundation of the house would make it safer while it would be floating. Like a boat dock, it rises and goes down with a change in the water level. And anchors are used on the sides so that the house doesn’t move horizontally while floating.
Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) is used to construct the amphibious base. It is a lightweight cellular plastic material that consists of small spherical balls. The main house and the shed are built using tin. The floating blocks of the house lift it when flooding occurs. Also the existing muddy floor is retrofitted by putting a wooden floor on top of it. Reused plastic bottles and pipes are arranged in layers below the wooden floor which function as hollow vessels. So when the water level rises, the air tight bottles uplift the whole house.
Retrofitted Floor Technology is helping the house to float on floodwater
This project aims to increase the capacity and resilience for flood risk management. It was applied in short range in the flood-affected area of Ranigram village of Khoshkbari in Sirajganj. SHARP and Sirajganj Polytechnic Institute together helped to implement the technology. To ensure community participation, many local people, students and mechanics took part in implementing different levels of designing and planning of the technology to make it more feasible and user friendly.
The ‘Core Bangladesh’ research project is aimed at developing coordination capabilities for flood-risk management and can be implemented easily. This project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The Institute of Water and Flood Management (IWFM) of BUET, a research company named HKV and IHE-Delft of ‘Delft University of Technology’, worked together on this project as academic and research partners. Ashik Iqbal, a research assistant, and Nadia Nowshin, from IWFM, worked on this project.
According to authorities, the pilot technologies launched by the project have performed well and the users found it beneficial. So, this is gaining attention of people from other flood-affected areas. They are getting interested in adopting this amphibious house technology.
Project officials say if provided adequate support, including that from prime stakeholders like the government, this technology can open doors to sustainable solutions for flood problems to a great extent in Bangladesh.
