Harsh weather, AKA extreme weather, covers a multitude of sins. Cold, hot, windy, snowy, and very wet. It means storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes, which impose strains on a building and can result in cracking and complete breaks. It includes prolonged periods of baking in the sun, which can warp, desiccate, wither, and otherwise weaken some construction materials.
The way the weather is going these days, increasingly unpredictable and more severe, we never know what’s coming next. What to build, then, that is the question. Even sticking to realistic scenarios rather than scary science fiction, you’ve got to be prepared. And yet you can’t build the Taj Mahal to put your factory or your international swimming college in. Too expensive, too slow. The legendary Indian mausoleum took 22 years to build and involved 1000 elephants, and although 17th-century methods and costs would have been very different from today’s, marble or indeed any stone would be prohibitively expensive.
Wood? No. People on Caribbean islands and the Florida coast must have been blown away if timber was all they had when an unnamed and unexpected tropical storm showed up. As for adobe – blocks of sundried earth or clay with straw for texture – that’s a mud hut, and a howling deluge would reduce it to liquid rubble in no time.
Bricks and concrete blocks were significant improvements, but the clear winner in purely practical terms is steel. This is the giant ape of the construction world, and yet it is hugely, ridiculously underrated. One revealing question is: why was steel critical in the construction of skyscrapers? Wasn’t the mighty concrete block tough enough on its own? Let’s look at this in terms of human anatomy. The concrete is the musculature, but that needs the skeleton, the bones that give it shape and integrity. As tough as it is, concrete can crack, and a steel frame is insurance against that. Look at poured concrete, used for floors and other areas where it is quicker to fill the space with a fluid that hardens to a solid. Often, it is reinforced for extra strength. Reinforced with steel.
Can Steel Buildings Withstand Hurricanes?
You bet they can – and this is a bet you can’t afford to lose. Steel is resistant to all kinds of threats. With an immensely strong steel skeleton and walls and a roof made of a differently prepared form of the same material, hurricanes are going to have no luck against your building. Suitably treated, steel resists corrosion, so sustained rain isn’t a problem. Ditto snow, hail, and sleet, those other cold, nasty projectiles.
At the other end of the spectrum, extreme heat isn’t a problem either. Special paints can reflect large volumes of the rays, and inside, insulation is the immovable object between the elements and the ambience. So, whether you’re keeping the heat out or in, insulated steel is up to the job.
Why Is Temperature an Issue When Building Structures Made of Metal?
This is not so much a real issue as a perceived issue. Everybody knows that metals are good conductors of heat and cold. So, if you’re building a corrugated iron shed, you’re going to feel what is outside. But a modern prefabricated steel building is light years ahead of that. With today’s state-of-the-art steel structures, temperature control is at the very heart of the thinking, and the idea is to reduce not just the variation in degrees Fahrenheit but the fuel bills that come along with that.
What Are the Disadvantages of Metal Buildings?
This is like the kind of question employers often ask candidates at an interview: What are your weaknesses? To answer the question on behalf of steel, we would have to go back to that word, perceived. Because the fact is that with the correct treatment and assistance, steel has no real disadvantages. There is the temperature conduction property, which, as we have seen above, can be mitigated both inside and outside. The issue of rust has long been dealt with by the use of corrugation – coating with a film of zinc and red oxide, which also gives protection against the elements.
Sound? If you have a mental image of clanging, cacophonous spaces, again this has been addressed by engineers and acoustic specialists, and it is now possible to tame the bouncing sound waves by judicious use of insulation and acoustic panels.
To summarize, the answer to “why do steel buildings outlast traditional construction in harsh weather?” it’s because scientists and engineers have looked at all the potential issues and found ways of dealing with them.
