Building Houses To Stand Up
To the Force of Hurricanes

When Peggy Koski and her husband, Rudy, moved back to his hometown of Moss Point, Miss., in 1993, the risk of hurricanes was high on their minds. The year before, Hurricane Andrew had flattened houses across large swaths of southern Florida and they wanted their new home to stand up to such a storm.

"When we built our house we told the designer and the builder that we wanted every safety [feature] we could for protection," Ms. Koski says. They poured an extra-strong foundation, used "hurricane clips" to secure the roof to the wall frames and the frames to the foundation, and had storm shutters installed on the extra-strength windows.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, "our house stayed intact," Ms. Koski says. "We were real thankful that we had put those extra things in to help it stand. My neighbors did not fare as well as we did. The backs of their houses were breached."

Houses like the Koskis', which stands about 57 miles from where the eye of Katrina made landfall, will likely be studied closely as the Gulf Coast begins its massive reconstruction effort. But in some ways the answers are already known.

"If you build to the latest standard of codes, they are going to resist something like a hurricane or earthquake," says Tim Ryan, who heads the disaster-response committee of the International Code Council, a nonprofit group that develops the building codes used by many governments. "Where you see a lot of damage is homes that don't meet that criteria."

Fay Faron in Algiers, La.

The problem is, many areas don't have or don't enforce building codes. That's true even after building codes were strengthened to prevent a repeat of the damage done by Hurricane Andrew to south Florida in 1992.

After Hurricane Andrew, Florida adopted the toughest building codes in the nation for its coastal areas, mandating storm shutters or impact-resistant window glass, and reinforced garage doors, among other measures. The standards were set according to wind maps that showed the high winds likely in the area.

But under heavy lobbying by homeowners and builders in the Florida Panhandle -- who contended that history didn't show a need for the added protection -- the toughest standards extend just a mile in from the coast there, even though wind maps show potentially devastating winds well inland, according to building and insurance officials. The state legislature is re-evaluating the Panhandle exemption, says Rick Dixon, executive director of the Florida Building Commission.

Louisiana and Mississippi have voluntary statewide building codes that leave it up to local governments to decide whether to use or enforce them. In both states, "some places had no building code and had no building department," says Jeff Burton, building code manager for the Institute for Business & Home Safety, a Tampa, Fla., research group funded by the insurance industry.

The problem is typically worse in smaller communities with low-income populations that lack the money to build as sturdily as possible and whose governments don't have the resources or the political will to properly inspect construction and enforce codes.

Hurricane Andrew exposed corner-cutting by builders and lax enforcement by code officials, says David Collins, manager of codes and standards for the American Institute of Architects. "We found a lot of problems that were built into those buildings that shouldn't have been even by the standards of that time," he said. "We saw roof sheathing that wasn't appropriately attached at all. That was a dead giveaway that codes weren't being applied."

Rescuers search a home in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

Of course, even the best building code won't help much if a house is under water. James Schwab, a senior research associate at the American Planning Association, says the only way to survive that is to raise the building off the ground and let the flood waters or storm surge pass underneath. "Basically you're on stilts," he said.

But in typical storms where wind does most of the damage, builders and "catastrophe modelers" -- companies that try to predict and then estimate the damage from major storms for insurers -- say that well-built newer houses usually do best.

Some older houses, such as from the early 20th century and before, fare reasonably well, too, in large part because they were "overbuilt" -- often constructed with heavier beams or more nails than later engineering deemed necessary. In Louisiana, locals extol the virtue of decades-old houses built with local cypress wood, which they say is better able to withstand a soaking by flood waters.

By contrast, homes built in the 1970s and 1980s can fare poorly due to a boom in lighter-weight, cheaper materials and construction techniques at a time of few hurricanes, when concerns over storm damage had ebbed, catastrophe modelers say.

Builders and insurance officials say code enforcement is often stricter for newly built homes than it is for renovations to older houses. When owners modify an older building, laws often require them to meet new codes, but contractors often skirt or ignore those rules by not getting building permits.

"They will simply go in and do work without pulling permits, keeping it kind of hush-hush," says Wade Scott Morrison, a Tampa, Fla., contractor who owns Wisdom Structural Inc. "It's going to be very difficult to change someone's ethics just because you change the building codes."

Homeowners are sometimes complicit, too, especially because of the expense of bringing a house up to code. "A lot of people have this idea that it's my money, what do I need the city telling me what to do?" says Mr. Morrison, who has been hired in the past to fix substandard work.

For wind resistance, a house's survival may depend on seemingly small things, such as if the windows and garage door are strong enough and if the shingles each have a couple of extra nails in them. If a garage door fails, for instance, the storm's winds can pump up the house "like a balloon and blow it off its foundation," says the International Code Council's Mr. Ryan.

Some people fear that in the rush to rebuild, the same mistakes will be made. "That seems to be something that happens in the wake of natural disasters; the rebuilding is done in haste," says Scott Frank, a spokesman for the American Institute of Architects. "They do cut corners, they do go below code -- in hurricane areas that's just a disaster."

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