StormStruck: The Tale of Two Homes to Open Late August 2008 at Epcot's Innoventions

**Figment!** · 05-18-2008, 10:26 PM

Epcot attraction will excite and educate visitors about Hurricane Charley
Epcot exhibit aims to thrill while teaching safety lessons

Maya Bell | Staff Writer
Orlando Sentinel
May 17, 2008

Hurricanes are about the last thing tourism officials want Florida visitors to experience. But starting this summer, Disney will treat them to the sights, sounds and fury of 2004's Hurricane Charley.

The only protective gear required: 3-D glasses.

Scheduled to debut at Epcot's Innoventions pavilion in late August, StormStruck: The Tale of Two Homes is designed to be fun -- yes, fun -- and educational.

It seeks to motivate homeowners to be sure their homes hold up as Chris Webb's did during Charley, as opposed to what happened to the home of his neighbor, Jim Minardi.

Except for a pool enclosure, the almost-new Webb home on Gulfview Road in Punta Gorda was unscathed when Charley howled ashore Friday, Aug. 13.

But across the street, the Category 4 winds ripped the roof off Minardi's 43-year-old house and gutted the interior. "A total loss," the retired college administrator said Friday. "We scraped it off the lot and started over."

The difference was in how each house was built, especially how well the component parts -- the roof, the walls, the floors -- were tied to one another.

StormStruck, an immersive digital surround-sound-theater experience, is based on what happened to these two houses -- and is designed to show homeowners that they can make their own homes safer: not by teaching the nitty-gritty of safe construction, but with a little Disney drama.

"What if we could put you in the middle of a storm and make it your job to figure out how to make a safer house?" said Joe Tankersley, an "Imagineer" with the Walt Disney Co.'s creative and design group, during a presentation Friday at the Governor's Hurricane Conference here.

"All the information about mitigation techniques . . . weren't really as important as getting people to understand, 'Hey, you can do something. It's in your hands. You can make your home safer.' "

According to a Disney description, exhibit visitors will don 3-D glasses and watch as their "safe house" is lashed by a hurricane and begins to break up around them. As the eye of the storm hovers overhead, they'll race against the clock to decide how to rebuild the home more safely.

Afterward, they can visit a "Weather Mitigation Research Lab" where they can learn building techniques that will make their homes more weather-resistant.
Tankersley conceded it seems "like a stretch" to use a theme park to teach storm mitigation.

He wasn't exactly wowed by the idea when approached more than five years ago by Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president and CEO of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, or FLASH. The nonprofit organization, which has more than 100 partners, is sponsoring the Epcot exhibit for three years with money from contributions.

"The first time I met Leslie, she started talking about weather mitigation, and I went, 'Yikes!' " Tankersley said. "That's not exciting."

But after thousands of hours of conversation, Tankersley said he and his design team of about a dozen artists were able to condense an encyclopedia of disaster-mitigation knowledge and techniques into a simple message that was crystallized, just a few months ago, by a 4-year-old Katrina survivor.

As part of a recovery exercise, the child created a crepe-paper collage and the image of a hand and described the artwork this way: "This is my house in the hurricane and I am fixing it."

Those words provided Tankersley his eureka moment:

"Four-year-olds think they have the power to change things, and when I read that, I knew what our message would be," he said: that you, too, can make your home safer.

Tankersley thinks the exhibit will motivate people to learn how to do that, but he acknowledges he isn't sure it will work.

Chapman-Henderson is more confident. After working in the disaster field for 25 years, she says the public is hungry for simple, how-to information that will protect their families and homes.

FLASH was founded 10 years ago by, among others, the National Weather Service after Hurricane Andrew left much of south Dade a wasteland. As a result, the National Hurricane Center was flooded with calls from distraught homeowners asking how to make their homes safer.

FLASH was created to help answer that question. Now -- by combining a little Disney magic and real-life drama -- they hope to make learning the answer fun.