Storm-prone places need to be more resilient as hurricanes get stronger due to climate change. Here’s how to construct a house that is more hurricane-proof.

Category 4 Hurricane Ida was remarkable as a cross-regional storm, spreading battering winds across the South and flooding rains deep into the mid-Atlantic, leaving a path of destruction from Louisiana to New York City. Despite costing well under $100 billion, it is only the ninth most expensive hurricane since 2000. Therefore, showing that hurricanes are growing more destructive as climate change has a greater impact.

The most expensive weather disaster is a hurricane, and according to a 2018 Journal of Climate study, climate change will result in an 85 percent rise in Category 5 hurricanes worldwide. Additionally, it foresees the need for an altogether new category for extremely devastating hurricanes. Evaporation grows as the oceans and atmosphere warm, drawing more water vapor into the atmosphere to be pummeled back to earth by rain and storms. Floodwaters must farther inland as a result of increased storm surges caused by rising sea levels along the beaches.

The frequency of the most destructive hurricanes has increased by three times in the last century, and since 1980, the percentage of significant storms (Category 3 or above) has doubled. These storms produce greater storm surges, more quickly increase wind speeds, and travel more slowly, giving floodwaters more time to accumulate.

What Characterizes a Hurricane-Proof Home?

For homeowners living near an ocean, hurricanes pose a unique challenge. Buildings are the most obvious indicator of a region’s resilience following a natural disaster. Surveying the severe damage begs the challenging question; how can we better rebuild? As hurricane intensity and rainfall rise due to climate change, more individuals will be asking about this issue. Furthermore, the location of a building is just as crucial as its design. But novel materials can help strengthen buildings against a hurricane’s suite of risks, including winds, flying debris, floods from rain or storm surges, and a wide range of experimental and off-the-shelf solutions.

The first line of defense against hurricane damage is building codes. The Wall Street Journal reports that stronger roof-to-wall connections, impact windows, and nailing rather than stapling roof shingles were all mandated by Florida’s stricter building regulations following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Tighter restrictions on the building materials in homes as well as improved education and certification requirements for inspectors and building authorities were a must as a result of other post-Andrew improvements. And, during Hurricane Irma in 2017, newer structures that had been built to code fared better.

According to Michael Rimoldi, senior vice president of education and technical programs at the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH), which counsels FEMA on hurricane resistance construction, “we found that a lot of places that don’t have an up-to-date building code are often where you see the most impacts from even the most minor storms.”

A home destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. New building codes, methods, and materials can improve Hurricane-Proof House Construction and potentially prevent such damages.

Although it would be brave to declare any home design hurricane-proof, there are several aspects that architects and contractors routinely look for when creating hurricane-resistant buildings. We must construct houses on a structural framework that can withstand crushing horizontal wind loads to withstand strong winds (and the ballistic debris that goes with them).

Aside from being able to endure impacts from falling sections of flying houses that didn’t clear this first bar, individual facade and structural components also need to be resilient. Additionally, hurricane-resistant homes must either be higher than storm surge levels or have a way to release floodwater pressure if it manages to get inside.

Builder Deltec specializes in building storm-resistant homes, and a crucial component of their hurricane hardiness is their distinctive appearance. The spherical shape of each Deltec house, which is typically only one story, diffuses strong winds. Its radial spoke-and-wheel construction resists wind and waves from all sides. At the pinnacle of the roof, where its pitch is also adjusted for wind deflection and lift reduction, it is secured by a steel compression ring. These homes feature tougher, thicker panelized plywood sheathing on the exterior, and impact-rated doors and windows. Almost every hurricane that it has endured hasn’t affected this formula at all.

A hurricane-proof home’s components

We can significantly increase the hurricane resistance of traditional wood-frame homes and custom residences by using off-the-shelf components.

Adapters and Ties

According to Rimoldi, “In the conventional wood-frame home, [it’s] how [it’s] all put together.” Mechanical connectors bind every component together, from the top of the roof to the foundation. If you make sure that all the walls are correctly fastened to one another and the roof, as well as to the walls and the foundation, you may build a wood-frame home that is just as sturdy as any other.

For this purpose, specialized metal connectors (such as those produced by Simpson Strong-Tie) are inexpensive to include in new construction and only cost a few dollars each. This method of retrofitting a property is more expensive, according to Rimoldi, who adds that it might add 1% to the overall cost. For each structural part along the vertical length of the house, Deltec uses larger mechanical ties.

Broken Glass

Impact glass, such as those seen in automobiles, won’t shatter like regular glass. The house can pressurize when windows break due to strong winds, which can cause the roof to come off and release hazardous debris. Heat treatments that boost the glass’s strength and make sure that should it break, the shards have smooth edges might contribute to its storm resistance. When a window breaks, laminated glass retains glass shards together by sandwiching two or more layers of glass together with a thin vinyl coating.

Foam Adhesive Spray

New roof-attachment techniques, according to Rimoldi, can increase strength, and spray-foam adhesives are approved for higher wind speeds (applied on the inside of the house’s roof, serving as insulation). The connections between the structural parts of your home are stronger with the adhesive insulation’s glue-like action. Additionally, it is water-resistant and can withstand floodwaters without becoming flooded for days.

Water Vents

Flood vents put at the ground level of dwellings enable water into the residence for homes that aren’t elevated, protecting a house from being pushed off its foundation by the intense pressure of rising floodwater.

Hurricane-Proof Materials of the Future

Experimental materials can help to increase storm durability, which is increasingly vital as hurricanes get stronger, move faster, and dump more rain. Although improvements have been achieved for wood and composite materials, innovations in this field have mostly concentrated on the strongest (concrete) and the weakest (glass).

Bendable Glass and Spinel Ceramic

Finding glass prototypes that increase the resistance of impact glass is the topic of numerous research projects. Bendable glass, which relies on engraved micro-fissures to enable it to flex without shattering, is being studied by researchers at McGill University. By preventing fractures from propagating, these jigsaw-like engravings make the glass 200 times stronger than regular glass. The glass experts at Corning are also working on the development of bendable glass, which will probably play a major role in folding devices. Additionally, researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory are creating spinel, an ultrahard ceramic “transparent armor” material with opacity levels comparable to glass.

Concrete with ultra-high performance (UHPC)

Ultra-high performance concrete is one of the market’s most promising new materials (UHPC). Cor-Tuf UHPC is three times more durable, ten times stronger, and manufactured from agricultural waste, calcium minerals, and water. The UHPC manufactured by Holcim under the trade name Ductal for usage in the United States is more well-known. Despite being six times stronger than normal concrete, UHPC may bend and yield. Very fine aggregate, frequently recycled materials, are in its construction (fly ash, silica fume). Even when some breaking has occurred, the material can flex and carry loads because of the insertion of carbon metallic or polyvinyl alcohol fibers.

At the Perez Art Museum Miami, a structure that appeared to be hurricane-proof and was unaffected by Hurricane Irma, UHPC is on full display. To sustain the museum’s curtain wall, UHPC was employed in 16-foot-tall, 5.5-inch-thick mullions that taper down to 2 inches.

However, UHPC cannot always be in place of conventional concrete. According to Robert Nordling, project manager for John Moriarty & Associates, the company that built the Perez museum, “It’s expensive, and you have to have a license to buy it and use it.” He claims that the material “wouldn’t be cost-effective in the bulk of typical building” because it is eight to ten times more expensive with these additional costs than regular concrete, particularly on smaller, lower-budget projects. However, due to UHPC’s strength, we require less material than conventional concrete, making it more effective in terms of weight.

Cementitious Composite for Engineers (ECC)

Engineered cementitious composite (ECC), which Victor Li is creating, is a variation of concrete that prioritizes flexibility over raw strength. Victor Li is a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan. Li explains that ECC is too pliable steel and Ductal is too hard rock. The material is in full-scale structures, bridges, and roads because of its great energy-absorption capacity against impact and seismic loads.

According to Li, “when compared with previous designs that don’t use ECC but use other anti-seismic approaches,” the 60-story Kitahama building in Osaka uses ECC in the building core to provide earthquake resistance. Li also notes that the building has a lower installation cost and a larger usable floor area. ECC costs two to three times as much as regular concrete. Where—and for what—does it make economic sense to develop with that kind of premium? That query is being posed by the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub). The biggest change in material analysis for disaster resilience, according to CSHub Executive Director Jeremy Gregory, is figuring out which systems are most cost-effective in specific places.

3D-printed concrete

Icon, a Texas-based provider of construction technology, created a concrete-printed house template that can build houses that are virtually impervious to disasters and are hurricane, wind, and disaster-resistant. For a 2,000-square-foot home, the company’s adjustable-width Vulcan test bed can print concrete walls up to 28 feet long and 8.5 feet high. The Vulcan works quickly, placing a 1-inch-tall, 2-inch-wide bead of its specialized Lavacrete at 5-7 inches per second. Compared to most concrete, this substance has a compressive strength of 6,000 psi.

Cross-Laminated and mass timber (CLT)

To create buildings that can withstand hurricanes, a company in the Bahamas is looking at mass wood in general and cross-laminated timber (CLT) in particular. Offsite CLT Construction uses CLT to design and construct commercial buildings, residential apartments, and single-family beachfront homes resist Category 5 hurricanes. According to the records by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, the most powerful storm ever to hit the Bahamas, the designs resist hurricane-force winds of more than 200 mph. It’s tied for the Atlantic Ocean’s greatest winds at landfall with sustained gusts of 185 mph (peaking at just over 200 mph) and is regarded as the deadliest calamity in American history.

According to Juan Cat Diaz of Offsite CLT, “one of the advantages of CLT is that it responds quite well while dealing with [horizontal] shear loads comparable to those experienced in earthquakes or a hurricane.” Another advantage, according to him, is that a typical timber-frame structure of comparable strength would need a lot more fasteners, brackets, walls with more studs, and close spacing between posts.

How much hurricane-proof housing costs

According to Gregory of CSHub, “people usually think about a payback for a more energy-efficient refrigerator.” They are aware that they have higher upfront charges but reduced ongoing expenses. It’s more difficult to deal with damage brought on by hazards. In most situations, asking customers to assume the worse to justify additional costs will lead to under-preparation.

Gregory’s study, the Break-Even Mitigation Percentage (BEMP), thus, examines the risk of hurricane damage over 50 years in a specific place, assessing the amount of damage, the type of building, and its building process.

This information assesses the financial efficiency of developing hurricane-resistant structures and estimates when the initial investment repaid by anticipated cost savings (from avoiding hurricane damage).

Building materials’ carbon footprints and other environmental effects add to the BEMP. In this approach, accounting for a natural disaster is essentially an overall measure of sustainability even though it may appear to be a discrete and individual cost-benefit analysis. Planners will be able to determine which regions climate change may render dangerously uninhabitable and which areas may continue with stronger buildings utilizing these materials and procedures with the help of this type of analysis. The BEMP may end up serving as a field manual for building enterprises wanting to use hurricane-resistant products and techniques along with a variety of shorelines that are at risk, balancing prudent economics with a strong desire to rebuild.

Effects of Climate Change on Residential Construction

Although certain areas’ building rules have changed, many homes built before those changes are still in existence. We cannot fully handle the effects of climate change and increasingly powerful and frequent Category 5 storms at the building scale. To make communities robust, we need to implement new materials and design innovations widely. Homeowners, contractors, and local governments must play catch-up with a worsening climate trajectory while the debate over federal government investment in climate-change resilience sputters on; rebuilding for today’s disaster while knowing that tomorrow’s disaster may very well be worse.

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How to Improve Hurricane-Proof House Construction