When a Projectile Two-by-Four Is All in a Day’s Work

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As a journalist, I’ve covered my share of disasters over the years. So when I discovered, through a scientist I spoke to, that there was a research lab in Rhode Island where scientists recreate the havoc disasters unleash, I was naturally intrigued.

The insurer FM Global uses things like wind machines and debris launchers to test and develop technology that helps businesses better prepare for natural disasters — critical, the company says, in the age of climate change.

The lab was a wonderland of weapons primed to destroy. There was the projectile missile launcher, which looked like a modern version of the ballista that Cersei Lannister orders up to bolster her anti-dragon air defenses in the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” (FM Global’s version hurls planks of wood at structures to test their resilience to debris thrown about by hurricanes.)

There were wind machines trained on roofs and walls to measure how much they would stand up to storm gusts. And there was the insurer’s hangarlike fire lab, where researchers test how things burn: plastics, huge rolls of paper, whiskey barrels, car parts, even frozen dinners.

There’s a certain sense of glee that pervades the ranks of the scientists and engineers here — “This job is an engineer’s dream,” one told me. Some of the tests aren’t as exciting as they would seem, however: One involves blasting roof shingles with a wind machine for two hours.

I got to fire a two-by-four myself. It was strangely satisfying to blast a plank of wood across the lab and hear it penetrate plywood with a loud crack. The only other projectile I’d ever fired came out of a rifle I shot, for the first time ever, at a farm in Kansas last year, where I was reporting on an article on the politics of climate change.

Perhaps it’s because I’m from a uniquely disaster-prone country, but I’ve always seen the specter of natural disaster as a matter not of if, but of when. (Japan’s capital, Tokyo, is one of the world’s most vulnerable to all manner of disasters, including floods, storms, storm surges, earthquakes and tsunamis.) So it was refreshing to talk to researchers who shared my impending sense of doom — and who were doing something about it.

Some of the research at the lab goes toward establishing industry standards and codes for roof assemblies and other building materials. The research also informs recommendations FM Global makes to its clients — to use a certain type of flood barrier, for example, or a sprinkler system.

Of course, insurance companies, which are society’s great aggregators of risk, have a big incentive to make sure companies do more to address natural and other disaster threats. They have also been the most outspoken on the dangers posed by climate change — though Louis Gritzo, the facility’s research manager, told me it tries to steer clear of debates over the science with clients.

“We’re not going to get into an argument over what caused it,” he said. “But we can tell them about the hazards. We can be factual about here’s the data that we have, here’s the science that we’ve used, and here’s what we believe your hazards to be.”

Though there isn’t a link to climate change, an earthquake shake table at the lab brought back memories. Those are a regular sight in Japan, training schoolchildren to duck under tables and ride out the tremor.

One thing I learned, though, was that the real event is always far more terrifying. When a magnitude 7.2 quake hit my hometown, Kobe, in 1995, the earth’s convulsions were far stronger than any recreated on a shake table. That’s something the researchers here are well aware of.

The bottom line, both then and at FM Global, is the same: You can never be completely ready for a natural disaster. But you can sure prepare.