The roar builds as wind and rain lash against the walls of a low-rise South Florida home. Loose objects — chairs, a bicycle, a bird cage — lift into the air and disappear on a massive gust. The wind accelerates until the sound reaches a deafening crescendo. Suddenly, the roof tears away. For a moment, the home is perfectly still, its insides bare to the world. Then, all at once, the walls collapse. And what used to be a home scatters into the wind before violently smashing into oblivion hundreds of feet away.
This is not a real hurricane. It is science in action at FIU's Wall of Wind (WOW), the nation's only university-based facility capable of simulating a Category 5 hurricane and testing structures at full scale. Over the last 20 years these capacities have enabled a wide range of innovative research into extreme weather that has helped reduce the impact of storms. The 2017 hurricane season alone cost the U.S. upwards of $339.2B (2024 dollars).
"The main beneficiaries of the work done at the Wall of Wind are the communities threatened by hurricanes and other extreme weather events," said Arindam Gan Chowdhury, director of the NSF-funded NHERI Wall of Wind Experimental Facility, interim director of the International Hurricane Research Center (IHRC), and professor of civil and environmental engineering at FIU.
As Chowdhury notes, the research at WOW tests more than just buildings, and includes things like "traffic signals, transmission and power systems, bridges, everything, even the natural environment including trees and coastal features." These infrastructure systems are often taken for granted, but when a storm disables them, the impact can be severe, bringing daily life to standstill.
The mission of WOW is twofold. First, help scientists better understand the effects of hurricane-force winds and wind-driven rain on the built and the natural environments. Then use the knowledge to make communities more resilient through technologies that provide solutions.
WOW demo of pre & post Hurricane Andrew roofs. Source: WOW
