Originally published at: Flood footage of basement wall collapsing in New Jersey home | Boing Boing
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Load bearing wood frame wall… a basement would be made from block.
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Don’t be in a basement in a flood.
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Several people drowned in NYC as those below-street-level apartments got flooded. There were several contributing factors: far more rain than the gutter & overflow systems could handle, more rain than the sub-floor drains (usually in the outside landing) could handle, doors that only opened outward & thus were jammed by water pressure, and “safety” iron bars over all windows which removed that possible escape action.
I don’t blame landlords or tenants for living in basement apartments which have been fine for the last 150 years. I do blame the city for failing to triple its rain-drain capability after the 2008 mess, and of course indirectly AGW.
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That table looked pretty heavy, too.
Two words in the English language which, when combined, remove all sense of gemütlichkeit:
German experiment
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Probably what in the US is called a “walkout basement.” The main entrance is in the floor above, but ground level is low enough in the rear of the house to allow at grade access. An with it, construction as if it was above ground.
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Yikes. My best friends child hood home flooded while he was at college. Lost a lot of cool stuff 
Never underestimate the force of floodwaters. Even slight sloshing or height differences can put extremely nasty forces on structures that were never build for that kind of thing.
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I’ve lived in a couple of places in that area with walkout basements. They had doors surrounded by cinder block - which was the same material used in the rest of the foundation. The weak point in that design would be the glass doors, but they definitely used stronger materials below grade than what was used for the exterior walls above ground level.
Should be that at least, concrete could be better.
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Spoke with my Staten Island niece this morning. Luckily she and her husband Dan reside high up on a hill, yet her sister-in-law (not that further down from them) still ended up with a flooded basement even though the storm surge never reached them; it was all due to the downpour, so torrential that Dan’s effort to drive over in his Ford Explorer to his engine company for a sump pump (to drain his sister’s basement) was thwarted by the blinding rain and the water cascading down the streets. How bad was it: He and his company have been called in before when previous hurricanes required rescuing people from a basement and another time from a stuck basement elevator (with a flooding shaft). Yet this time he — a twice-decorated firefighter — couldn’t even make it to his firehouse. Anybody here with family/friends on SI? Give 'em a call.
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Came here to reflect on how terrifying that would be and y’all are all talking about building codes 
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