Using Special Nails to Save Roofs

Using Special Nails to Save Roofs — and Dollars; "People are waking up and looking at sheetrock in their house instead of the sky"

Tanya Brown-Giammanco, a research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety in Richburg, South Carolina, explains how she makes hail to test the resiliency of roof shingles. The institute has pioneered a new method for building resilient houses, which has been used in thousands of homes in the US. © The Pew Charitable Trusts

Part Two of Storm Surge: How States Will Have to Step Up As Disasters Become More Frequent and Expensive

New roofs are coming to Africatown, a hamlet of crumbling shotgun houses amid ancient pecan trees northwest of Mobile Bay.

The replacements, many of which will go to the neighborhood’s poor and aging homeowners, are being paid for by a first-of-its-kind state grant program that aims to lower homeowners' insurance rates and reinforce Alabama homes against future windstorms.

Alabama officials, like state and local leaders around the country, expect disaster recovery costs to continue to grow as people live in vulnerable areas and climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. At the same time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is considering a plan that would shift more recovery costs to the states.

In response, some states are taking steps to ensure that communities can better survive disasters, efforts they hope will lower recovery costs down the line.

Charleston, South Carolina, is spending millions to send flood water back to the ocean through underground tunnels and pumping stations. Miami has been working on flood prevention as the ocean inundates the city with greater frequency. And in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, New Jersey began taking over vulnerable properties and rebuilding coastline to better protect communities just beyond the dunes.

But homeowners, too, have to be ready for storms. A quick return of residents after a disaster can deter blight and boost local businesses.

Brian Powell, director of the Alabama grant program, hopes the improvements homeowners are making will encourage insurance companies to reduce rates and be more willing to cover coastal properties — and make rebuilding fast and economical the next time a hurricane sweeps up the Gulf of Mexico or a tornado rips through the state’s rural, northern counties.

"We figured the only way to reduce [insurance] rates was to reduce risk," he said.

The new roofs are built using a method developed by the industry-funded Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS). The "Fortified" standard — which can be used for a roof or an entire house — requires special nails, a specific system for layering roofing material, and more secure connections between the roof, walls, and foundation of a house. It is higher than most local building codes, even in hurricane zones.

Alabama's embrace of Fortified has made it an unlikely leader in building and retrofitting houses to survive big storms. It not only boasts the grant program, which helps pay for new roofs in the state’s two coastal counties and eventually will reach the rest of the state, but also requires insurance companies to offer premium discounts to homeowners who have built or upgraded their homes and been certified as Fortified.

A number of jurisdictions in Alabama have adopted Fortified as their minimum standard.

'"A lot of people say, 'Never again,' but they have actually taken steps to mean ‘Never again,' ” said Julie Rochman, president of IBHS.

The program is new, but it is catching on, Rochman said. She points to at least 80 chapters of Habitat for Humanity that are building Fortified roofs and homes. Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and South Carolina are also encouraging the construction of Fortified homes.

Some Alabama homeowners are upgrading their homes without state help. But many people in poor communities like Africatown, which is home to descendants of slaves who were illegally brought to the United States in 1860, cannot afford to replace their roofs without the grant.

The homes here, built mostly before 1965, with some dating back to the early 20th century, are not designed to withstand the storms that can roll in from the Atlantic Ocean, through the Gulf of Mexico, and up Mobile Bay, like Hurricane Ivan did in 2004.

In communities like Africatown, taking steps now to strengthen homes could mean the difference between being able to recover and getting wiped off the map.

"We are proud and tickled to death about how far we've come," said Cleon Jones, a former New York Mets outfielder who returned home to Africatown after his baseball career.

He's working to help his neighbors, some of whom are skeptical of government assistance, to get new roofs through the grant program.

"People are waking up and looking at sheetrock in their house instead of the sky," Jones said.

Homes in parts of the US that are most susceptible to hurricanes are covered by stringent building codes that require things like special roof and wall coverings that resist wind and added protection for windows, doors and vents. But many Americans live in areas with codes that do much less to address high winds.

"We keep rebuilding in the same vulnerable places, in the same brittle ways, over and over again," Rochman said. "It's not good for us from a national security perspective. It's not good for us from an economic perspective. It’s not good from a community perspective."

For example, most homes in the infamous Tornado Alley, a strip that stretches from Texas to the Dakotas, are not built to withstand high winds, said Anne Cope, the vice president of research at IBHS, which has a research lab in rural South Carolina.

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Using Special Nails to Save Roofs — and Dollars; "People are waking up and looking at sheetrock in their house instead of the sky"

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