Designing Waterparks for Disasters

Last year’s hurricanes reminded us how much damage these fairly regular occurrences can wreak.

In August, the Southwest suffered about $125 billion in damage from Hurricane Harvey. No area was hit harder than the Houston Metro. Yet a relatively new waterpark — Typhoon Texas, in the Houston suburb of Katy — went relatively unscathed. “For the newer [structures] that we did, the code ... in Katy was much more stringent than previous codes,” says the property’s engineer, Terry Brannon, president of the C.T. Brannon Corporation in Tyler, Texas. “So all our slide towers, buildings and roofs on our buildings — even the mechanical-room roofs — had to withstand these high winds.”