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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
April 2019 #11237 Page #90
Choosing Resiliency: Lessons from Hurricane Michael By Doug Allen, P.E. Doug Allen, P.E., a structural engineer with Simpson Strong-Tie, looks at the choice homeowners in disaster-prone areas face between simply building to code and building to standards of resilience or IBHS FORTIFIED Home™ standards instead. Resilience, or resiliency: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
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n the wake of the most recent and very devastating hurricane seasons, the theme of structural resiliency has resurfaced with renewed urgency for increasing numbers of homeowners, builders, Designers and civic planners. Hurricanes pose a triple threat of high winds, substantial rain and storm surge. Extreme weather has cost the nation nearly $100 billion in damage during 2018. Accordingly, awareness has risen within affected and surrounding coastal regions regarding their communities’ existing structural resilience ratings (low or high) and the need to improve in view of the losses as well as the time and cost to rebuild what was destroyed. In the days after Hurricane Michael made landfall, helicopters, drones and survey teams began to document the new historic event and quantify the destruction as a first step to recovery. Mother Nature very decisively differentiated between structures built to withstand her forces with little to no damage and those that were not built for resiliency. News reporters gravitated toward the stark contrast between the structures still standing and the surrounding devastation. One such example is the much-publicized Sand Palace on Mexico Beach. This juxtaposition raised many questions: What made this structure so resilient? What were the differences between this structure and the others? How much did those differences cost? Were they differences in design, in construction or both? Was this added measure of resilience known prior to the storm? And so forth. Continued next page
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