It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway.
For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.
I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.
Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
Honestly, that protruding rebar reminds me of the common practice in some Central American countries of pouring the columns and crossties for the first story and leaving rebar stubbed out the top for a future second level which may or may not ever get built.
Oh, that’s a common thing all over the world - it’s generally because property taxes aren’t payable on incomplete structures. Seen it everywhere from Bulgaria to Cambodia to Egypt.
That's a myth, albeit one commonly held everywhere, even by locals.
You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-income countries with wildly different legal histories and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories for how the loophole came about?
Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures differently, but that only begs the question of whether a habitable structure lived in would be considered incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.
The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and real estate finance. In places where people invest their savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or similar as is common in more developed countries with robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid real estate markets, they often plan to build incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story. This is much more feasible with concrete construction as it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas with loose building codes or lax enforcement.
In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that these structures are methods of investing savings. What's sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never finished at all; hard-working people's savings effectively lost.
Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars, even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened because of the force of the water against the house on top of it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large piece of floating debris hits it.
> even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily withstood.
Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.)
Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area.
Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
