"We tested a [regular] home out here," Cope said, pointing to the IBHS test chamber, which uses 105 fans, each nearly 6 feet in diameter, to simulate hurricanes, wildfires, hail and wind-driven rain. "And we trashed it. Popped it open like a sardine can."
The lab at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety can simulate storms including hurricanes, wildfires, hail and wind-driven rain. © The Pew Charitable Trusts
If more homes were built to the highest standards, which are only required in high-risk hurricane areas like the Florida Keys and the Outer Banks, along the North Carolina coast, there would be less destruction, Cope said.
Because Fortified exceeds even those standards, it makes sense for homeowners in high-wind areas to adopt it, regardless of their local building codes, she said.
Fortified roofs are secured with grooved ring shank nails that lock into place and cannot easily be pulled out, making them more resistant to wind. They also have twice as many nails as traditional roofs. For homeowners who want to go further, there are also Fortified techniques for strengthening windows and doors and tying a house to its foundation.
Maintaining the roof is important because as soon as a door or window pops open during a windstorm, a house becomes a balloon, filling with air and sometimes forcing the roof to disconnect. Once that happens, a home is typically not salvageable.
There are only 4,326 Fortified houses in the country so far, but the ones that have been tested have proven their worth, Rochman said. Following a strike from Hurricane Ike on the Bolivar Peninsula near Galveston, Texas, in 2008, only the Fortified homes were left standing.
"The fact that our houses survived and nothing else for miles around did was an impressive validation of Fortified," she said. "But nobody wants to come back to a community where there’s nothing but 13 houses."
Alabama is encouraging more homeowners to build to the Fortified standard by mandating that insurance companies offer premium discounts to those who do.
Under a 2009 insurance law, homeowners can save as much as 50 percent on the wind portion of their policy if their construction is officially certified. States like Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Oklahoma have followed suit and enacted similar laws.
The Alabama mandate not only encourages residents to build more resilient homes, but also reduces the risk that insurance companies face. It enabled insurers to decrease coastal insurance rates that skyrocketed after Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast in 2004 and 2005, Powell said.
Along the coast, wind coverage is the biggest portion of homeowners insurance. After the hurricanes, residents were paying several thousand dollars a year for it. "It caused a lot of people to just go uninsured, especially people without a mortgage," he said.
Depending on the size of a home, it costs about $10,000 to meet the minimum Fortified standard. But in addition to the insurance discount, Fortified homeowners may see as much as a 7 percent increase in their home value, according to the Alabama Center for Insurance Information and Research at the University of Alabama.
"When you’re getting that large of a reduction in your insurance costs at the coast, it lets you afford a little more for the house or it makes the expense of living in the house less," said Lawrence Powell, director of the center.
The cost of repairs also decreases with a Fortified home. After testing a Fortified and a traditional home against a 100 mph simulated windstorm, IBHS collected repair estimates for the traditional home that were as much as eight times that of the Fortified structure.
The coasts have always attracted business, industry and tourism. But the density of new development, combined with rising sea levels, is putting a great number of homes, businesses and people at risk.
A post-World War II population boom brought more residents and tourists to Miami. As time went on, more hotels and businesses were built closer and closer to the ocean, putting them at significant risk when massive storms, like 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, make landfall.
Andrew's destruction of South Florida laid bare the lack of code enforcement in places like Homestead, a city that was leveled by the storm.
"You could see that the roofs were literally flipped open and … because nobody had gone back and enforced the code," Rochman said.
In other places, too, officials have found — often too late — that building codes were not strong enough or weren't adhered to.
After 200 mph tornadoes flattened Joplin, Missouri, in 2011, city officials found many homes weren’t built to the city’s minimum code, which the city strengthened after the storm.
In Orange Beach, Alabama, rising seas and hurricane threats are no match for the lure of the seashore. The city’s white sand beaches beckon retired baby boomers and families looking for vacation homes.
Many of the new communities there have covenants requiring new buildings meet Fortified standards. And in 2012 it became one of the first Alabama jurisdictions to add Fortified to its building code for new homes and renovated roofs. To encourage homeowners to get their homes officially certified, the city also offers rebates on building permit fees.
More than 300 houses have been built or renovated using Fortified standards since Orange Beach adopted the code.
The combination of grants, insurance mandates and building codes in Baldwin County, home to Orange Beach and the Gulf Shores resort town, means insurance rates there have begun to stabilize after the price rise that followed Hurricanes Ike and Katrina, said Terry Quinley, an insurance agent who used the grant program to put a new roof on her house in Bon Secour, a short drive from the beach.
She's now saving 15 percent on her wind premium.
More carriers are willing to write policies for beachfront property now, she said. "That’s beneficial because it has brought in more [companies] that are willing to take a little more risk."
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