COLUMBIA, S.C. - Property and casualty insurers are hoping a new facility coming to South Carolina will do for home building what a similar testing facility in Virginia has done for car safety.

The Institute for Business and Home Safety announced Wednesday its plans to build a $27 million research facility in Chester County that will allow scientists to see exactly what winds from a Category 3 hurricane do to an 1,800-square-foot, two-story home.

Researchers also will look at the effect of hail and wind-blown fire on home construction.

"This is going to be the controlled experiment that we've been looking for for quite some time," said Scott Schiff, director of Clemson University's Wind and Structural Engineering Research Facility, which tests construction materials in high winds. "They will be able to do full-scale destructive testing."

The Insurance Center for Building Safety lab will be big enough to hold a full house. Researchers also will be able to let houses sit in the elements to see how aging affects their ability to withstand different weather issues.

The goal, says Julie Rochman, president and chief executive of the Institute for Business and Home Safety, is to minimize damage.

Rochman previously worked for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the auto insurance industry. The group puts out a Top Safety Pick for each model year and does research on other issues such as child safety seats and teen drivers.

The Institute for Business and Home Safety is funded by property and casualty insurers, who also will be paying for the research facility in Chester.

Rochman said the home safety research will attempt to use "that same science-based approach to loss prevention on the property side that we've taken on the auto side."

"We've told people what to do, but we haven't had the ability to be scientifically based and tell them why it's important that they do these things," Rochman said.

Improvements in building standards depend on such research, said Jennifer Gibson, spokeswoman for the International Code Council, whose members vote on changes to building codes that cities and states often use as models for local construction safety laws.

"A lot of our suggested changes come from these groups," Gibson said.

Recent standards adopted for residential building in high-wind areas, for example, came from research done at Louisiana State University, Gibson said.

Rochman said the institute considered partnering with a university "on the theory that the university would lend credibility to our efforts and that we could keep the costs of the facility down."

But the institute decided it would rather own the results and the agenda for the research. Rochman said partnering with a college in Florida where the institute is headquartered, for example, probably would have limited the research to hurricane damage.

"We really wanted to look at earthquakes and hurricanes and fire and hail and dry wind as well as wind and water," Rochman said.

The center's location in Chester County, about halfway between Columbia and Charlotte, N.C., was chosen, in part, because it is at least 100 miles from the coast and unlikely to be in harm's way during a hurricane. The facility will be about an hour from the Charlotte airport, but secluded enough so the considerable noise during testing - about the same as a jet engine - won't bother neighbors.

When it comes online in 2010, the testing center will have about 20 full-time employees, not including local construction crews that will build the test houses.

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