As hurricanes get stronger, so must area structures

In the aftermath of two serious hurricanes last year and Hurricane Ian in 2022, renewed attention is being paid to how buildings are built and how to best protect your property against the worst that storms can bring.

It’s a natural — and necessary — reaction to scenes of destructions after the recent storms. 

But the subject of resilience is a constant one for many in government, construction, architecture and engineering charged with making sure buildings in Florida are prepared to deal with the worst that hurricanes can bring.

“After each one of these storms you learn more — more policies are put in place, more stringent standards are put in place,” says Tom Rees, a partner at Halfacre Construction in Lakewood Ranch.

“You have to figure that this could happen again and what standards can you put in place.”

The jobs of those tasked with making the state’s buildings as safe as possible is to look at the materials and technologies available and figure out how to use them to build, or often rebuild, properties.

Most of the rules dictating how buildings need to be built along the coastal areas of Florida are dictated by the ever-evolving Florida Building Code and rules coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It’s common practice, though, for those in the industry to go beyond what’s regulated as they work on projects designed to last long after storms pass.

Halfacre's current projects include the construction of the new Sarasota County Administration Center and the redevelopment of the Sarasota County Terrace Building.

Both projects are being worked on with a focus on resiliency.

With the Terrace Building, a historic 10-story downtown Sarasota property, the project includes installing impact windows and waterproofing and painting the entire exterior.

(Painting and waterproofing helps keep water out of buildings and improve the structural integrity by keeping water damage to a minimum.)

The center, meanwhile, is being constructed using advanced building materials to make it is hurricane resistant. It will also have redundancies built in, including a huge generator, so officials can be back up quickly if the power goes out.

Pretty much every material was thought of and is to the highest standard, says Rees.

The code

While damage from recent storms brought renewed attention to resilience, it is by no means a new subject.

Florida has been focused on upgrading its building codes since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Today’s Florida Building Code is a stringent set of rules designed to make sure properties are built to withstand storms.

One expert after another talks about how important the code is when it comes to protecting people and property in the state. And they universally point to Fort Myers Beach as an example of why it is needed.

After Hurricane Ian in 2022 there was a clear delineation between Fort Myers Beach homes built before 1992 and those after. Through the air or driving along the barrier island six months after the storm, one could see the newer buildings were damaged but had withstood much of the storm. Empty lots, on the other hand, stood where the older structures once stood.

“Those new buildings really are designed and built to withstand major weather events.”

His firm is in the process of building a K-8 school on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa described as “a cutting-edge, climate-resilient facility.”

The project's resiliency includes buildings elevated two feet above the 100-year floodplain to mitigate flood risks and using Insulated Concrete Form exterior walls and reinforced foundations.

Another resiliency example is in Sarasota County, where the 67-year-old Bird Key Yacht Club decided late last year to build its new clubhouse 15 feet further inland and three feet higher than the current building.

Live and learn

There are other ways people in the region are attempting to bring more resiliency to construction after the storms. Consider Dean Ruark, vice president of engineering and innovation at PGT Windows and Doors in Venice, a unit of Miter Brands. He is also a structural engineer.

“One of the things that I do, along with several other engineering teams, is go out after each storm… and see what actually happened to structures,” he says. “We do that with some of the FEMA groups.”

The idea is for the teams to get to the hardest hit areas immediately after a storm — before people are back in their homes and beginning to clean and patch up damage — so they can “actually see what happened.”

Once there, the work turns to making damage assessments of homes to get a sense of how the current building code performed and or didn’t. It also leads to improvements in the code. 

The program is called StEER — the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance Network — and its goal is to gather information on “the performance of the built environment through impactful post-disaster reconnaissance disseminated to affected communities.”

What the engineers are looking at and inputting into the system are details such as what year the home was built, what type of structure it was, what types of windows, doors and roof did it have and what were they rated.

“The key to what you're looking for is, as we build each new home, are we are we investing the stringency in the right places to mitigate against risk?” Ruark says.

And are we?

Ruark, like most who are asked if the state's rules are doing enough, says the “Florida code is exceptional” and in his experience structures built to new codes, with high elevation finished floor height and breakaway wall systems in the areas where they are needed, fair well in storms.

“What we're typically seeing in those damage assessments, and it’s getting to be a pretty common thread, is the older housing stock is really getting decimated or pretty well wiped out.”

This article originally appeared on sister site BusinessObserverFL.com.