The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, one of the Hub’s newest practitioner partners, is a non-profit research organization focusing on natural hazards’ effects on building safety and durability. It conducts comprehensive research on natural hazards to understand the resilience of various structures, such as mobile and manufactured homes, against wind loads and extreme weather conditions.

Test structures ranging in shape, size, and stage of construction undergo full-scale demonstrations in the main chamber.

The IBHS stands out from similar organizations in one particular area: its innovative and hands-on approach to testing. Researchers conduct full-scale demonstrations to illustrate and validate IBHS-issued guidance.

In fact, the research center is the only lab in the world that can test full-scale one- and two-story residential and commercial buildings in a controlled environment. Alegbeleye and Porada were able to see this firsthand when they explored the site’s main chamber.

The main chamber houses IBHS’s acclaimed wind tunnel. Standing about six stories in height, more than 100 giant fans, whose blades are nearly the size of airplane propellers, line the wall. In the middle of the chamber sits a structure waiting for testing. This setup makes the wind tunnel perfect for replicating realistic weather events, including hurricanes, tropical windstorms, wind-driven rain conditions, and straight-line windstorms.

The combined power of more than 100 fans can replicate realistic weather conditions, including Category 1, 2, and 3 hurricanes.

For Alegbeleye, the scale was almost overwhelming.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of the chamber is its rotating floor, which allows buildings to be adjusted to different wind angles during testing,” said Alegbeleye. “Seeing fully furnished test structures set up in the chamber was surreal. These buildings weren’t just shells; they had everything from washing machines to kitchen appliances to furniture.” 

The visit also included facetime with representatives from the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association (NCIUA), another one of the Hub’s practitioner partners. Porada, who is part of CHEER’s buildings and households thrusts, is collaborating with the NCIUA. She is using data from the organization’s “Strengthen Your Roof” program to analyze how households make retrofit decisions through this grant incentive.

“The NCIUA has granted CHEER access to the data of more than 40,000 households,” Porada said. “Having access to all of this information is exciting because we can reach out to a large population.”

For Alegbeleye and Porada, some of their key takeaways were very technical: how research influences building codes, AI’s potential for providing critical missing data, and the importance of testing and data-driven research in civil engineering.

However, both could agree on one key sentiment: the importance of interdisciplinary partnerships in tackling natural hazards.