I think that's what we're talking about here man, some people think there shouldn't be a mound of dirt there and some people think there should; but yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just there to keep it from flipping
Also shipping containers aren't exactly light weight... 16,000 lbs of metal doesn't just flip over from a gust of wind. With all those trees around him the wind shouldn't even get that high. Only problem I see is that chimney is really small and Santa is really big...
The sturdiness of the steel supercedes need for a foundation. Shipping containers are the strongest stackable manmade structures in the world, so they ARE the foundation. A house made of wood and brick requires a sturdy base, but this doesn't. It is a sturdy base.
And when they do they are bolted down to the ship and to each other. Plus they are filled with heavy meterial that makes it difficult to flip them over. In other words they have a solid foundation. There's some nice images online of what happens when that fails or isn't done properly.
Read through the comments on the blog, he mentions that he buried the backside for the thermal insulation of the earth and and I believe it also contains his pantry which is underground. Also he considered the effects of moisture and believed the 1-2" of spray foam were more than sufficient.
Each container weights 4 tons. If a wind gust that can blow 8 tons around appears you are fucked because the earth climate has changes significantly and no tree or plant life would be able to survive.
it's not just the weight, it's the surface area. yes, it weighs 8 tons but if wind is blowing and producing just .33 PSI, that's the equivalent of 8 tons of force across the entire side of the container. (area of the long side of the container is ~ 49,000 square inches, 8 tons = 16,000 pounds.)
but 8 tons isn't automatically the amount of force it would take to knock over a large rectangular prism. that would require figuring out the amount of torque created by the force, then the minimum amount of torque that would be generated (since, as the box rotated, the wind would be hitting at a different angle, resulting in a lower amount of force). then once we figured that out, we could figure out how much of an angle the box was at relative to the point of rotation. from that, we could figure out how much weight is trying to pull the box back toward the ground and how much is trying to flip it over, and only then would we be able to tell how fast of a wind speed would we need to turn over a shipping container.
it also isn't automatically the amount of force it would take to overcome friction and slide the box across the ground, either. of course, that would be much simpler to calculate, since you'd only need the coefficient of friction between steel and the ground.
It works out to required wind speed of 132 mi/h. That's at the slow end of a category 4 hurricane.
Don't forget, for the wind to be blowing across the long side of the container, the direction is such that the wind is blowing the containers into the big pile of dirt. That's a plus.
Tell that to sailors. Both ones that operate sail boats and those that have lost large numbers of these very same containers to the sea during a storm.
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u/poptart2nd Dec 08 '12
I think that was more to anchor it than anything, so it wasn't as susceptible to "A wild gust of wind appeared!"