Owner of miracle home in Mexico Beach opens up

No sound so w/ no text, not much to tell but -- how much did he spend to build it?

Shows that if one does build to high-enough standards can survive quite a lot that lesser construction techniques won't. DOH!

Seems pretty obvious if one has the wherewithal to be able to do so; not sure just how much more it does actually cost...in comparison to the loss otherwise, probably doesn't seem so much after the fact. :)

It does have sound. 15 to 20% more than if he had made it for 125 mile winds, the n'hood standard. Their standard was iirc 250 mile winds, although you have to have a good architect and engineer to know how to shoot for that. I dont' think it's enough to just buy bigger everything.

Hurricane windows. Two broke but did not fail. Not sure what that means. Shattered but stayed in place and kept the water out? Shattered but they were dual pane and the unbroken pane kept the water out?

He used 40 foot piers instead of 30 foot.

Note that there were other houses in the picture that were still standing, but not many.

The hood standard is 130 MPH. Everyone has to build to that.

I bet it is 140 next cycle.

Impact window are like windshield glass. The glass can break but the structure, held by the plastic inner layer stays.

Just the new ones.

Mex Bch, Pt St Joe and Panama City have just missed the storms that tested a lot of houses built to the pre Andrew codes. I also imagine inspection was not that comprehensive back there in the boonies in the

70s and 80s either so they didn't even meet the 1960s codes. That was the biggest problem exposed by Andrew. Miami Dade had the strongest building code in the country, maybe the world but the enforcement was non existent. Those houses in Homestead were slapped together using northern workers and northern thinking, not the southern building code. Everything assumed the biggest load would be down. There were sheets of plywood with a dozen or two, 6 penny nails. Southern code is 4 to 6 times that many using galvanized 8 penny ring shank nails. There was no "continuous up load path" In the SBC, since forever, The trusses are strapped (not twisty clips) to the studs. All studs are strapped to the footing. In block construction you have rebar in the block, both sides of any opening and every 4', continuous from footer steel to the truss ties in a 16" solid poured tie beam on top. The "doweled" cells are poured solid too. When I saw that block building that had blown down, my first question was "where was the tie beam and where were the doweled cells"?

This is really a picture of the ground electrode but you can see how the steel goes into a block building in Florida.