Massive IBHS Facility Simulates Extreme Weather to Study Building Materials and Practices

The insurance industry-funded Institute for Business & Home Safety has opened a new facility that can replicate the effects of hurricanes in order to yield data about the relative merits of various building materials.

The Institute for Business & Home Safety's (Tampa, Fla.) multirisk building science research center in Chester County, S.C., is breaking new ground in the evaluation of building materials and processes -- and its findings are likely to help power more precise catastrophe loss modeling and underwriting, according to Tim Reinhold, the IBHS's SVP for research and chief engineer. The massive new P&C-industry-funded laboratory is designed to simulate Category 1, 2 and 3 hurricane-force winds, extra-tropical windstorms, thunderstorm frontal winds, wildfire ember showers, and wind-driven rain and hailstorms.

The center's capabilities largely derive from a wall of five-and-a-half-foot-diameter electric fans that can deliver winds up to 140 miles per hour within the facility's 21,000-square-foot test chamber, the IBHS says. The laboratory's 750,000-gallon water tank supplies the chamber's 200 nozzles, which can simulate rain at a rate of up to eight inches per hour, the institute reports, noting that specially designed ducts and mechanisms will enable the introduction of hailstones, burning embers and various types of debris into the chamber's wind stream.

Officially opened in October 2010, the center's initial research will focus on improved roofing performance because roof covers are replaced more frequently than any other building component, according to an IBHS statement; changes to roofing products and installation requirements can result in significant paybacks at a reasonable cost and within a short period of time, the IBHS adds.

Increasing Awareness

One of the aims of the research center is to increase consumer awareness of the impact that lower-quality building materials could have in their lives, according to Reinhold. He points to the successful publicity campaigns of the Institute for Highway Safety that persuaded people about the value of airbags through videos that showed the effects of even moderate-speed collisions on crash test dummies. Accordingly, the IBHS has invested in the ability to create high-quality videos that consumers can access on the Internet.

"Right now, if you build in the extra strength to a structure, appraisers will not necessarily value it differently; realtors will not necessarily stress the greater safety of a home," Reinhold asserts. "That value won't be seen until, as a society, we start to value that strength."

The lab's fundamental purpose is to assess the strength of building materials and their propensity to result in or prevent unnecessary losses, Reinhold continues. Not unlike Underwriter's Laboratories, the IBHS lab's findings will help drive more scientific materials standards -- in this case construction materials -- and practices, which in turn will enable the creation of data for underwriting and claims analysis, he suggests. "Eventually we may get to a product comparison scenario through star ratings that would help an insurer understand what's gone into a house, as that bears on the vulnerability of the structure," Reinhold says.

The IBHS has examined photographic evidence of disasters and researched the local building codes to correlate them to the fragility of the affected areas, according to Reinhold. Through such studies and the additional research at the center, the IBHS will generate data that could help catastrophe modeling companies, such as AIR, RMS and EQECAT, refine the fragility curves within their catastrophe models, he says. "As you refine those fragility curves, you're able to more accurately predict losses," Reinhold explains.

The center's research will provide greater insight into the cause and effect of losses, Reinhold asserts. "Right now, the [CAT models] can project an answer in terms of overall losses, but not always based on hard data about how a given structure was damaged," he says.

The center is looking to partner with trade associations (rather than individual manufacturers) to ascertain how they are building and rating products, Reinhold relates. Current industry ratings often are suspect, he claims.

While the center's work is in its infancy, data that the IBHS collects on materials and practices will likely be used by the member insurance companies that fund the organization for underwriting and claims analytics purposes, Reinhold affirms. Ultimately, he says, the IBHS hopes to influence a more data-driven approach to addressing the vulnerabilities of structures to weather-related events.

When it comes to assessing the effects of such events, "too much has been anecdotal," Reinhold insists. "You don't understand the relationship of location, materials and damage as related to the magnitude of the event that caused it."

The IBHS research center will perform its first wildfire test in March 2011. "We'll ... simulate real-world ignition sources to show the importance of good home maintenance," relates Joe King, a spokesman for the IBHS.

Such experiments demonstrate the research center's ability to scientifically tackle issues that were not addressed in the past, Reinhold comments. "Nobody before had built a facility to get extreme events right," he says.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio