By Kyle Odegard
For the Democrat-Herald | Posted: Friday, May 2, 2008 12:00 am
CORVALLIS - Sixth-graders gasped as a two-foot wave of water rolled toward them - and weeks' worth of their work.
"Oh my gosh," someone exclaimed.
The water crashed over models made of small wooden blocks and glued together with toothpaste. Many of the tiny buildings remained intact, despite the equivalent of a 30-foot wave hitting them.
About 350 middle school students visited Oregon State University's Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory on Thursday to test model tsunami shelters. About 10 schools participated in the project, in which students built models of vertical-
escape shelters. The idea is that more lives could be saved during a tsunami by getting people to the upper floors of a building and above waves, rather than having them flee from the tsunami impact zone, which could take too much time.
"The structure has to survive, but at the same time, the structure has to be tall enough," said OSU engineering professor Harry Yeh, before waves swept into the models of varying designs.
C.J. Horgis of Lebanon's Seven Oak Middle School, for example, said he and a classmate created a wedge at the front of their building to break the force of a tidal wave.
OSU's Tsunami Wave Basin, at 50 meters by 25 meters, is the largest facility of its type in the world.
Tests on whether vertical evacuation would work in Oregon, using a detailed model of downtown Seaside, wrapped up two weeks ago. Data still are being crunched.
The middle school students' exercise - figuring out the best shelter design and building it - was much better than just reading about the problem in a book, Horgis said.
At Seven Oak, students in Horgis' select science class spent about a month learning about tsunamis and the forces they generate, and the type of structures that could withstand them.
"Reading it in a textbook is one thing. But seeing it happen, connecting science with life, is much better," said Nick Asay, a science teacher at Falls City Elementary School.
Falls City seventh-grader Ethan McConnell was disappointed with the test. About half of his classmates' structures were destroyed by the waves. His team's triangular-shaped model was unscathed after three soakings in the tsunami basin, each one bigger than the last.
"I thought we were going to do more. I knew this one could take way more."
Kyle Odegard can be contacted at 758-9523 or kyle.odegard@lee.net.