Wave Impact Study on a Residential Building

Recent natural disasters around the world including both tsunamis and hurricanes, have highlighted the inability of wood buildings to withstand wave and surge loading during these extreme events. Little is known about the interaction between coastal residential light-frame wood buildings and wave and surge loading because often little is left of the buildings. This leaves minimal opportunity for forensic investigations. This paper summarizes the results of a study whose objective was to begin to better understand the interaction between North American style residential structures and wave loading. To do this, one-sixth scale residential building models typical of North American coastal construction, were subjected to tsunami wave bores generated from waves of heights varying from 10 cm to 60 cm. The lateral force produced by the wave bores were, as expected, found to vary nonlinearly with parent wave height.