IBC provides $500,000 for research into building safer homes

The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is providing Cdn$500,000 to support a unique facility at the University of Western Ontario called The Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes.Formerly known as the Three Little Pigs project, the facility is a typical 1,900-square-foot, two-storey house enclosed within a corrugated steel shell. The facility enables researches to study realistic damage to houses as a result of wind, snow, rain and mould all within a controlled environment.Western’s Faculty of Engineering is conducting research at the facility, which is located at the London International Airport.”Canada’s home, car and business insurers are very pleased to support the research taking place at The Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes at Western,” IBC president and CEO Stan Griffin said in a press release. “Insurers have long been concerned that we need to be better able as a society to deal with extreme weather and natural disasters.”The one-of-a-kind lab allows researchers to subject houses to the destructive elements of nature, including simulated winds of up to a Category 5 hurricane (200 mp-h). Engineers will be able to assess the structural integrity of houses and help develop cost-effective methods to retrofit existing homes and reduce human error during construction.Insurer funding for the facility is in addition to the industry’s long-standing support for the research through the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) – a joint industry initiative with Western. IBC’s donation to The Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes will be matched four dollars to one by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.”We are grateful for IBC’s support of this leading facility,” says Ted Hewitt, Western’s vice-president of research and international relations. “This is a great example of industry and the research community coming together to improve living standards in Canada and around the world.”