Wall Street Journal Article About Hurricanes and New Building Codes
Homes Built to Stricter Standards
Fared Better in Storm
Florida owners benefit
from homes built to more-stringent codes: ‘Tree branches bounced off of our
roof. But the house is fine.’
By Laura Kusisto
and Arian Campo-Flores
When Hurricane Wilma pummeled Florida in 2005, it nearly
ripped the roof from Stephany and Michael Carr’s house in Naples, which was
built before a 2002 building code took effect statewide.
After the storm, the couple retrofitted their house to
comply with the new code. They added a standing seam metal roof with continuous
panels connected by strong fasteners. And they invested in hurricane
impact-resistant windows and doors.
The upgraded home withstood Hurricane Irma without issue.
“It looks like a bomb destroyed our trees and yard,” said
Ms. Carr, a 58-year-old lawyer. “Tree branches bounced off of our roof. But the
house is fine.”
Ms. Carr credits the more-stringent building code with
saving her home and their lives. “For anyone who doubts these codes, I invite
them to sit in a pre-code structure in a Category 3 storm or higher,” she said.
As homeowners in Florida begin to take stock of the damage
from Irma, one pattern is beginning to emerge: homes that were built to the
stricter building codes seem to have fared better.
“The feedback we’re hearing is positive,” said Rusty Payton,
chief executive of the Florida Home Builders Association. “We’re all interested
and there will be a deep dive. It appears that it did its job.”
Bill Wheat, executive vice president and chief financial
officer at home-building giant D.R. Horton Inc., said his company’s early
assessments “indicate that the more recent building standards post-Andrew over
the last 20 years have held up relatively well.”
The evidence so far is preliminary. Insurance companies,
home builders, city and county officials and local resiliency experts say they
are still conducting assessments of how homes and commercial buildings built to
different standards held up during Irma. Homes in the Florida Keys, for
example, tend to be older and were the most badly damaged areas from the storm,
but until a few days ago the Keys were inaccessible to researchers.
Julie Rochman, chief executive of the Insurance Institute
for Business and Home Safety, a research organization backed by insurers, said
it is too early to say definitively what role the building code played in
minimizing destruction during Irma. But she said early feedback from a research
team that put in place instrumentation throughout southern Florida during the
storm is encouraging.
One of the team’s meteorologists who toured some of the
affected areas was “very pleasantly surprised,” Ms. Rochman said. “It looks
like the building codes have proved themselves, that the new construction has
done well.”
Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president and chief executive of
the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, said she has noticed the roofs of older
homes look like checkerboards with shingles missing. Flying shingles are a
larger concern because they can hit people and property and cause additional
damage.
Research led by Kevin Simmons, a professor at Austin
College, looking at insured-loss data from 2001 to 2010 found that the building
code reduced windstorm losses by up to 72% and that there were $6 in losses
saved for every $1 of additional construction costs. The paper is expected to
be published shortly in the Land Economics journal.
Tom Lykos, a local builder in the Naples area, said his
two-story house, which was finished in 2003 and meets the new more stringent
standards, came away with nary a scratch from Irma.
Mr. Lykos, who is about 5 miles from the water, said at one
point the wind was enough to topple a large oak tree outside his door.
“I know stuff was bouncing off the house and my house
suffered no damage whatsoever. The newer construction really stood up to the
winds,” he said.
Others were less lucky, he said. A client of Mr. Lykos whose
home was built in the 1990s to less stringent standards sustained severe damage
both from wind and flooding, though Mr. Lykos said the home is also closer to
the ocean. He said many older homes took on several inches of water but newer
homes, which are built further above sea level, didn’t.
Florida has one of the strongest building codes in the
country. Passed statewide in 2002 after Miami-Dade County beefed up regulations
in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the new rules required newly built
homes to have stronger fasteners that prevent their roofs from blowing off,
nails instead of staples and impact-resistant windows in certain areas, which
manufacturers sometimes check by firing pieces of plywood out of cannons at
them.
Philippe Houdard, a resident of Miami’s Brickell financial
district who rode out Irma in his 16th-floor condo in a tower built after the
new code took effect, said he felt secure throughout the storm.
“At no point were the windows rattling,” he said. “I didn’t
feel vulnerable.”
The downside to the new code is cost. Builders estimate that
regulatory compliance can add as much as 45% to the price of a home in some
parts of Florida, compared with about 25% nationally.
Florida passed a bill this spring that gives the Florida
Building Commission flexibility to evaluate whether or not to make code changes
to keep up with technological advancement and removed a requirement that it
adopt International Code Council standards every three years.
Critics say it will gradually weaken the standards that just
helped protect swaths of the state from a hurricane.
Mr. Payton of the Florida Home Builders Association said the
change would simplify bureaucracy and help save home buyers money, but added
that, “We don’t want to build houses that blow down.”
The change was opposed by Craig Fugate, the head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Obama administration, who said
that 25 years after Hurricane Andrew, the state had forgotten lessons learned
and was once again letting building-code standards lapse.
“The longer you go between hurricanes the more people forget
how bad it was and start thinking maybe it was an off year and we can start
saving a lot of money if we don’t build to these codes,” he said.
Appeared in the
September 18, 2017, WSJ print edition as 'Newer Homes Hold Up After Irma.'
On a personal note, my family and I weathered the storm in our new home in West Villages without incident. My parents and neighbors sought refuge with us as well. Then with our one year anniversary of moving in coming up, we had a full home inspection done on Wednesday (9/20). It passed with flying colors, and the inspector said there wasn't even a single cracked roof tile. That is a lot of peace of mind right there!
Thanks for reading!
Ali
Ali H. Johnston, MBA in Real Estate
REALTOR®, Lic. Broker #BK3284964
West Villages Realty LLC
19503 S West Villages Pkwy
Stes A2 & A11 (by Appt)
Venice, Florida 34293
Office: 941-460-3179
