Hurricanes Helene and Milton have carved trails of devastation through the US Southeast.
But photos show some homes are still standing in rubble-strewn neighborhoods, and there are lessons to learn from them.
Satellite images show areas where entire blocks appear flattened after Hurricanes Helene and Milton — except some houses still stand.
Winds upwards of 140 mph pummeled houses, broke windows, and peeled away roofs. The damage is clear in satellite imagery.
“It’s not luck,” Leslie Chapman-Henderson, the president and CEO of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, told Business Insider.
FLASH is a nonprofit that advocates for disaster-resilient homes and publishes a guide to hurricane preparedness.
“I think if you look at a house that survived, nine times out of 10 it’s going to be because the roof is well connected and the garage door stayed in place,” Chapman-Henderson said. “Those are the two biggest clues in a wind event.”
The garage door can make a huge difference.
Hurricanes can collapse houses when their powerful winds get into windows or doors. Once these openings have let the wind in, pressure inside the house rises, filling the building like a balloon.
“Now you’ve got not only the wind whistling over the roof trying to suck the roof off, but you’ve got this internal pressure trying to push the roof off,” Michael O’Reilly, a licensed engineer and construction instructor at Colorado State University, told BI.
Perhaps the biggest opening in a house is its garage door.
“If you’re doing only one thing, do the garage door because that is your largest and weakest opening,” Chapman-Henderson said.
That’s why Chapman-Henderson says it’s the most important part of the house to board up ahead of a storm, and the first thing to consider upgrading.
FLASH recommends three different options at different budget points. The cheapest is to grab a drill and board up the garage door with wood 2-by-4s ahead of any incoming storm.
The next option is to spend about $200 to $750 to have a professional install a garage-door storm kit with struts and braces that permanently reinforce the door.
Finally, homeowners can spend a few thousand dollars on a new garage door that’s rated to withstand high winds.
While the garage door may be the largest opening in a house, the windows are the most numerous.
“A lot of buildings will survive at the start of the hurricane until a big window or door blows in,” O’Reilly said. “That increased pressure will lift off the roof, and then they’re in trouble.”
That’s why the Federal Emergency Management Agency recommends storm shutters, shatter-resistant film, or high-impact glass to reinforce your windows. According to FLASH, different types of storm shutters can cost anywhere from $5 to $50 per square foot.
Alongside openings like windows and doors, house-resilience experts talk about a home’s connections — most critically, how its roof is connected to its walls.
A strong connection has to be established when the house is constructed, by using hardware like metal straps.
You can’t really tell if your house has that hardware because it’s usually “hidden behind architectural finishes,” O’Reilly said. But, he added, modern homes in places like Florida generally have the proper connections because of building codes.
Houses built before the late 20th century probably don’t have those strong connections and are more liable to lose their roofs during a storm, he said.
According to FLASH, you can reinforce your roof’s connections a bit by going into the attic and applying flooring adhesive where the roof deck meets its supporting rafters or trusses.
Lifting a house up on stilts can protect it from a storm’s waters.
Much of the damage and death from Helene and Milton came from flooding and storm surges.
As hurricanes trend more destructive, it’s even more important to protect your home.
The rising global temperatures caused by humans’ carbon emissions are making hurricanes more ferocious.
That’s partly because tropical cyclones feed off of warm waters. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricanes can more easily whip themselves into a frenzy. More storms are intensifying rapidly, like Hurricane Milton, which means their windspeeds increase drastically over a short time period.
At the same time, rising temperatures in the atmosphere allow the air to hold more moisture. That means hurricanes can dump more rain along their paths.
It’s as good a time as any to strengthen your home.
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