An inventor in Colorado has come-up with a neat idea to create a house which can float-up with flood waters.

This is an interesting idea to help combat flood damage like that seen this past year with hurricane Katrina and friends. This inventor has created a system where a house is built on top of telescoping supports sunk deep into the ground. Underneath the house’s rafters, there are large plastic air chambers. As flood waters rise, the air chambers float on the water, thus lifting the house like a raft, while the telescoping cylinders keep it from floating away (that part is rather key to the concept!)

Channel 9 news in Denver has a video interview with the inventor.

An interesting tangent to this story is how the inventor showed the concept to the Army Corp. of Engineers (I hope that’s capitalized and spelled correctly) and they thought it was great. He then showed it to FEMA who dismissed it immediately. Following that, he showed various congressmen who thought it was great. OK – do you see a problem there? Why did FEMA so quickly blow the concept off while even non-technical politicians could see the value? Insert theories here, but I won’t bore you with mine and this is not a political blog. 😉 If interested, there are more details under the FEMA link on the first link above.