At her previous job with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, she helped wreck cars and trucks to figure out how to design for safer vehicles and less injuries and fatalities. Rochman is actually no stranger to destroying things for a living. Rochman initially thought special effects shoots might be a smart way to generate ancillary income for the institute, but every studio she contacted said they only demolish everything digitally these days. Even Hollywood doesn’t really blow up buildings like this anymore. This massive indoor test chamber, the only facility of its type in the world, is actually a long-term investment by the insurance industry. While the experiments at the IBHS test center are all about destruction, the end results are all about safety, specifically, how to strengthen homes to avoid the damage cause by wind gusts, storms, and wildfire, and help homeowners and businesses both rebuild and prepare. Rochman and her staff of engineers and scientists don’t play God for fun, however entertaining it must be to have routinely destroying and demolishing homes as a job description. “I don’t play god.” The test chamber at the IBHS facility can create winds equivalent to those in a Category 3 hurricane. “I play Mother nature,” says Julie Rochman, the president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Building & Home Safety, who runs the test site. Lab technicians can control the guns to precisely mimic different kinds of hail, adjusting the downpour to match digital records of storms drawn from their extensive library, which contains everything from derechos to tornadoes to category-3 hurricanes. Now, a series of 12 hail cannons, each with six barrels that can freeze and fire pellets at just the right terminal velocity and angle, hang from the test center roof. Researchers actually spent months creating special ice trays and freezing the pellets, only to discover that such a slow, deliberate method took so long, it made the test financially unfeasible.Īfter three years of research, the solution was more mechanical. That’s not something you can do with an everyday ice machine. After working for months to figure out the correct wind speed, duration, intensity, and shape of hail-drawn and precisely modeled from extensive storm records-they needed to recreate the individual ice pellets. The first trial run didn’t work out so well. ![]() At their 90-acre test site in Chester County, South Carolina, that’s dedicated to burning, shredding, and otherwise destroying test homes, the researchers wanted to simulate a barrage of frozen rain inside their five-story test chamber-all for the sake of learning how to build stronger and safer structures. The scientists and researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety studied the phenomenon for roughly three years.
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