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Why would someone who lives in a hurricane area not have a backup genset? That just sounds foolish. Everywhere in the US gets power outages. Plan accordingly.
That's what we're doing. Scheduled for installation sometime in December. Next hurricane season we are going to be prepared.
Guess what, now that you have done this there won't be a hurricane for 10 years or more. It's some sort of law of consequences. Like washing your car then it rains when it hasn't rained for months.
Location: Finally the house is done and we are in Port St. Lucie!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1AngryTaxPayer
Why would someone who lives in a hurricane area not have a backup genset? That just sounds foolish. Everywhere in the US gets power outages. Plan accordingly.
My Mother in Law has lived on the Treasure Coast for over 20 years. She has never had a generator. She does what most do, live through it the best way they can. She has acclimated to the weather and doesn't actually put on her AC unless it is really hot or we come over to visit.
She has been through several longer lasting power outages. This last time was the shortest and she did very well. We did try to get her to stay at our house longer (we didn't have power either) but she wanted to be in her own house. She is 86 years young.
How slow do you work? Two years to repair damage from a busted window? I've completely renovated two homes from top to bottom within 30-60 days. And the most important thing is your life... getting caught in a wildfire, earthquake or tornado is much worse and dangerous, both for your home and your lives.
Requires knowing good subs/contractor or being handy yourself. That being said, I've had one of my properties bathrooms redone in a week because of the above
San Diego. Except they've got other problems right now.
This. Except for the fact you have to be a doctor or lawyer, work two or more jobs, or have bought your home in the 70's and it's paid off already to actually live there. I'm a native San Diegan, will always love it, but the cost of living is insane. And the wildfires such as 2003 & 2007 were devastating to many.
How slow do you work? Two years to repair damage from a busted window? I've completely renovated two homes from top to bottom within 30-60 days. And the most important thing is your life... getting caught in a wildfire, earthquake or tornado is much worse and dangerous, both for your home and your lives.
The problem after a hurricane is everyone is looking for the limited number of people who are licensed to do such work if they can't do it themselves. Then you have to wait for the limited number of inspectors. A new roof may take a year or more to get done, plus sometimes you don't want to do it right away if you can help it since materials skyrocket. Wait six months and the materials costs are back down to normal. We were lucky after Matthew, our roofs were damaged but not severely, but our HOA got on the insurance company and one of our neighbors found a roofer who was willing to do it but still it wasn't until March that they began some of the roofs. Other roofs were being put off to begin next year so that we don't need a special assessment. We have 15 buildings and insurance covered several after deductibles. Building a house around here by contractors takes a long time. I have yet to see a house go up as fast as they did in South Carolina, however, they are probably built better because they have to meet the new hurricane standards.
The problem after a hurricane is everyone is looking for the limited number of people who are licensed to do such work if they can't do it themselves. Then you have to wait for the limited number of inspectors. A new roof may take a year or more to get done, plus sometimes you don't want to do it right away if you can help it since materials skyrocket. Wait six months and the materials costs are back down to normal. We were lucky after Matthew, our roofs were damaged but not severely, but our HOA got on the insurance company and one of our neighbors found a roofer who was willing to do it but still it wasn't until March that they began some of the roofs. Other roofs were being put off to begin next year so that we don't need a special assessment. We have 15 buildings and insurance covered several after deductibles. Building a house around here by contractors takes a long time. I have yet to see a house go up as fast as they did in South Carolina, however, they are probably built better because they have to meet the new hurricane standards.
Even so, we are not talking two year time frames. Since Irma, I've had my roof already fixed, pool enclosure is all ready to start being built at the start of January, gutters have already been cleaned etc... two years?! That's nonsense.
This. Except for the fact you have to be a doctor or lawyer, work two or more jobs, or have bought your home in the 70's and it's paid off already to actually live there. I'm a native San Diegan, will always love it, but the cost of living is insane. And the wildfires such as 2003 & 2007 were devastating to many.
Doctors struggle in many parts of cali... reimbursement is less than in tx or fl and housing is more expensive. There are doctors who prob struggle to rent houses in SF when you've got $160k Google engineers complaining about that problem
How slow do you work? Two years to repair damage from a busted window? I've completely renovated two homes from top to bottom within 30-60 days. And the most important thing is your life... getting caught in a wildfire, earthquake or tornado is much worse and dangerous, both for your home and your lives.
It's all too obvious that you have no experience with a catastrophic hurricane ( such as a Cat 5 storm, as Andrew was), and being in the area of the most destructive winds in the northern eyewall, as our neighborhood was. I wish our damage had been caused by and limited to a "busted window", that would have been an easy fix. No, we're talking winds they determined later on ( the wind gauge at the Nat'l Hurricane Center, located at the Coral Gables UM campus at the time, broke when the winds reached 164 MPH, so no direct readings past) at 180 MPH or more. We were one of the few homeowners around then to have put shutters on our windows before Andrew hit. Our damage was initiated, we believe, when a 20 foot long 4× 12 beam, broken off from the 40 foot long beam supporting the horizontal pillars on the edge of the roof overhanging a neighbor's lanai were blown up over his house, across the street, and right through our metal shuttered window in the living room. Those parts of the roofs over the lanais from the houses on that side of the street broke off in their entirety and became flying missiles in Andrew's winds-they were found either straddling the roof peaks, on the lawns of the owners, on the street or in some cases, in the neighbor's yards across the street.
So the beam that first went through our shuttered window, not only broke the glass, it took out the frame, and we never found the shutter, there was just a gaping hole there. The beam apparently went through the second window in the living room the same way, but there we just saw a giant hole in the shutter and shattered glass, and the beam went bumping it's way along that side of the wall, cracking the CBS in several places as it went, and finally went through yet another shuttered window in another room. That let those winds in the house, and that's what tore off the roof on that side of the house- including the plywood, and trusses. Those trusses were actually broken, we found broken pieces of truss in the yard, and noted that they had been twisted off where the ends were still attached to the tie beams by hurricane straps. We looked up to daylight in the living room and part of the family room.
Of course the insulation, AC ducting and electrical wiring were scattered all over, our living room and other areas were full of wet and ruined furniture, broken glass and other debris, both ours and from our neighbors. Our across the street neighbors' office furniture, files and who knows what else ended up in our pool.
Of course a top to bottom rebuild could be accomplished in 30-90 days-under normal circumstances. But under the circumstances following a major storm effecting so many people, and the vicissitudes of human nature determined to take advantage of the vulnerable under such circumstances, trust me, this won't be the case. We didn't have the cash ready to finance a rebuild, like so many others we had to depend on our homeowner's insurance to pay that claim. But we had to get in line for that-and we were told we had to wait till they took care of the folks who lived in the zip codes where the news media had declared to be where the worst of Andrew hit-that was Homestead, Cutler Ridge, and Country Walk out in SW Miami Dade county. We didn't get enough money from our insurance company to do much about rebuilding till mid-December when the third adjuster they sent actually went through the property and listed the damage, and that was nearly 4 months after the hurricane.
We had a small mortgage on the house, even so, the entirety of our rebuilding money went to our lender to hold and release to us, apparently as they saw fit. They were not a local mortgage company, so had no clue and it was like pulling teeth to get them to turn over any money-they even informed us they believed we would just waste that money on trips and so on instead of using it to rebuild, because there were so many stories around about people who did that. We finally sikked the FL Business and Professional Regulation (who told us they couldn't do much except to threaten our mortgage holders to limit the number of mortgages their company could write in FL, but they'd help us any way they could), and the Michigan Attorney General's office on the mortgage company, and they finally agreed to release the money over and above what we owed on the mortgage (which was most of it), and release the rest when inspections on the house were completed.
It was very hard to find a decent contractor who was not big time over extended, and while ours was reputable and had do e good work, there were lots of delays, with the permitting process, trying to find decent workers, inspections, tearing down and redoing shoddy work or work that had not passed inspections, shortages of materials due to demand from so much rebuilding. It took our contractors a year to rebuild that house to the point where we could move back in, and there was still work to finish.
Although we had a signed contract for the details of the rebuilding, and the price, our contractors had over extended themselves, had taken on too many jobs and lost money, and it seemed obvious to us that they were trying to recoup some of those losses by charging us over the agreed on prices, taking shortcuts and using cheaper materials (but still charging us for the more expensive materials we wanted). We learned that they had stopped paying their subcontractors even though we had paid the contractors according to the draw schedule. We got all this straightened out, with subs paid, inspections completed, and release of liens obtained, but it took another year after we got back in the house.
And yes, with the stress of all that, I do consider those two years to be among the worst years I ever spent.
And please, with that speech about my life (and I'd add the lives of my loved ones) being top priority in any disaster, you ARE preaching to the choir. I'm sure I am more aware of that than you can ever know, not just from being in the back of that house holding a door shut against those hurricane winds tearing apart the front of the house, when I was sure we would die, but from other life experiences before and after that storm.
In regards to the relative safety of riding out a hurricane in a strongly built and shuttered concrete block house, I would agree with you that for the most part you, and the house, will probably emerge relatively unscathed, especially if it's not a strong storm. But to assume that it can never be much, much worse under the right circumstances (such as a Cat 5 storm) because you have never been in such circumstances, and can't imagine them, is just naive. And you do no one any favors by poo-pooing such circumstances because you know nothing about them.
Location: Finally the house is done and we are in Port St. Lucie!
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Wow!
Thank you for reliving that horrendous experience for those of us that have not (and hope to never) gone through that kind of powerful hurricane.
Getting a first hand account is valuable.
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