And that's in a region with far less damage than coastal areas hit hard by Charley and Ivan. Even builders who weathered the hurricanes unscathed, such as WCI Communities, of Bonita Springs, Fla., are dealing with the materials backlog.
“We were lucky in that we were somewhat inland and not in the eye of the storm,” notes Kelly Goldsmith, marketing director for WCI's Fort Myers office. “Our community was built with the newer codes, so the thing that's impacting us most is the bottleneck with suppliers and trouble getting materials. We're having to put our orders in way in advance to make sure we have materials when we need them.”
DAMAGE CONTROL: Disposing of thousands of downed and damaged trees kept debris fires burning for days on hard-hit Sanibel Island, near Fort Myers.
New HUD codes work, but a huge inventory of older manufactured homes remains at risk.
According to statistics collected by Florida Trend magazine, Hurricane Charley destroyed 12,000 homes in Southwest Florida and left another 19,000 “uninhabitable.” But what's more telling is that almost every one of those destroyed homes was a manufactured home.
That doesn't mean manufactured homes can't weather a hurricane. In 1994, two years after Hurricane Andrew destroyed 99 percent of all mobile homes in its direct path, HUD raised the building standards for manufactured homes. Those changes included tie-downs and anchor systems in high-wind areas, adding about $4,000 to construction costs. The problem: Only 16 percent of the 900,000 manufactured homes in Florida prior to the 2004 hurricane season were built after 1994.
Another complicating factor, according to Mark Nunn of the Manufactured Housing Institute, in Arlington, Va., is that people often tack on carports and additions.
“A lot of the [2004 hurricane] damage to manufactured homes built prior to 1994 was caused by carports,” says Nunn. “They added additional loads that the house was never designed to withstand. Carports generally took a portion of the roof with them when they failed, resulting in a buildup of internal pressure in the home.”
Conversely, when HUD officials toured Punta Gorda after Charley, they found that most of the newer manufactured homes built using the 1994 HUD code (especially those with hurricane shutters) performed well. Most of their damage was caused by windborne debris—and the homes weren't toppled or lifted from their anchoring systems.
FIRE AWAY: A Texas Tech University study last summer found that vinyl and fiber-cement siding in typical wall assemblies are penetrated more easily than brick. (Of course, like many hurricane-resistant materials, brick costs many times more installed than vinyl and fiber cement.) As part of the study, a 7-foot 2x4 was fired from a cannon (shown) into wood-framed walls clad in the three materials. Videos of the test show the 2x4 penetrating both vinyl and fiber-cement wall assemblies at 34 mph, while the projectile bounces off the brick. Richard M. Bennett of the University of Tennessee Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering carried out the tests, which were sponsored by the Brick Industry Association. Jery Huntley, executive director of the Vinyl Siding Institute, notes that no similar testing has been done of vinyl siding, because some of their products meet current Florida high-wind building codes and there have been no problems. And Denese Bottrrell of James Hardie Siding Products says fiber-cement siding has a proven track record against flying debris, as seen following Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
The choice between impact-resistant glass and shutters weighs economics against street appeal.
With tougher rules about window openings part of Florida's new building code in some counties, window companies see a potential new profit center. For affordable housing, however, storm shutters may be the only option.
Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president and CEO of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, says window protection is perhaps the most urgent requirement for new homes in hurricane zones. Even when new homes suffer little structural damage in a storm, blown-out windows can cause interiors to be completely ruined. One new affordable window-protection product, Fabric Shield, a fiber-reinforced synthetic material made by Wayne-Dalton Corp., costs about the same as aluminum panels, Chapman-Henderson says, but can be added to and removed from windows much more quickly and easily (see chart, below).
VARIETY PACK: With window protection such an important factor in minimizing hurricane damage, builders have a number of options at several price points from which to choose.
Credit: Source: Federal Alliance For Safe Homes