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I am troubled by what appears to be a one man crusade by Brad the weatherman at WAFF. Specifically, he is pushing for the idea of code enforcement (and the inevitable zoning that comes attached to such enforcement) on residential property in Limestone County - with the theme that homes built to the standards will survive or survive with less damage in a tornado.
We moved back to Alabama from Florida, and I know absolutely where this road leads, and it ain't pretty. More on that in a later. That is a secondary point to my main one.
We went through Hurricane Andrew, Charlie, Frances and a few others in Florida. A hurricane is ENTIRELY different than a tornado in many aspects. Brad seems to have somehow equated the two.
It is entirely possible to weather most hurricanes safely in houses built with rafter straps, storm panels, sill bolts, and proper concrete construction. Hurricane strength upon landfall is regularly and accurately predicted, sometimes days in advance.
It is NOT possible to safely weather a tornado in a house - constructed to code or not. The rating of a tornado is only determined after the fact. A forecast might anticipate weak or strong tornadoes, but that is not reliable. The only truly safe places in a tornado are in a proper shelter or out of the area. Bathrooms and inner rooms are places of last resort and nowhere near as safe as a proper shelter.
Here then is where I feel Brad is doing a disservice. By focusing on code, even to the point of standing next to the stub of a wall that was torn apart in the tornado and showing an anchor bolt, and then saying that the anchor bolt held the sill in place, is laughable. The house was still damaged to the extent that survival was more by chance than design. By focusing on this, Brad gives the impression that houses are safe in tornadoes. That will have the effect of fewer people seeking proper shelter in storms in the future.
That is extremely troubling. If instead, he had reported that "Even this home, which was built to code, experienced sufficient damage that the occupants would have been better off in a storm shelter" then he would be saving lives in the future.
Rather than dilute this extremely important point, I will put my other objections in a second post.
Follow the money. He has to justify his salary. So therefore he needs to bring in more viewers so the station can charge more for advertising. Ever wonder why a day or two after storms the stations have a commercial patting themselves on the back with local yahoos claiming that their their lives were saved by watching them?
By him saying stuff like this it gets the focus on him and the station. Follow the money.
Well, what he actually said on his Facebook page was that he wants to encourage home builders to come up with house plans that include concrete reinforced shelters at no added cost to consumers. He went onto say that there has to be a way to do this. I don't think it's a disservice at all.
He does a good job IMO but he may not understand construction and what it actually takes to build a structure. He probably could have worded his report differently, but I think the intent to help people is there.
I have friends who had shelters built into their homes when they were built. No reason contractors can't make this a standard option on homes. Even if they went up in price a "little", a solid 4x6 storm shelter shouldn't cost more than $3-$4k and could easily be integrated in home plans.
I didn't see him on TV, but his Facebook post doesn't give the indications above. Properly set in concrete anchor bolts will do their job, however they need to be anchoring more than wood in this situation. Some storm shelters can be built with wood studs and reinforced by concrete and steel plating. In that situation the proper anchor bolts will hold. Just some food for thought.
Follow the money. He has to justify his salary. So therefore he needs to bring in more viewers so the station can charge more for advertising. Ever wonder why a day or two after storms the stations have a commercial patting themselves on the back with local yahoos claiming that their their lives were saved by watching them?
By him saying stuff like this it gets the focus on him and the station. Follow the money.
But of course. News stations stay on the air from ratings. If they get a chance to "advertise" they have to take it. Quite honestly after watching Dan Satterfield for a long time on WHNT I stopped watching. I distinctly remember him (in the middle of a tornado) constantly stopping the coverage to ask someone to go check on his wife. By the time he told us where the tornado was, it had passed my house.
Brad has been pretty consistent on keeping the coverage focused on all of us. Quite frankly if I had to put my life in the hands of a weather reporter it would be Brad Travis over anyone on WHNT or especially anyone over Channel 31. Just me though.
Even if a house I were buying included a concrete safe room, I would still install an underground shelter. I have seen too many above ground shelters that are not properly reinforced and will not stand up to an EF4, let alone EF4. False sense of security, IMHO and no real way to actually verify the construction of the shelter and how it is anchored. I have seen builders just build cinder block rooms and not even anchor them to the existing foundation with re-bar...mortar alone is not going to keep a cinder block room from blowing away in a strong tornado.
I do agree with Brad's assessment that all builders should be anchoring sill plates to a slab with bolts and nuts, not just pounding in square nails.
My folks house down in Florida, a mid 50's rancher, is a Concrete block house with rebar. the roof is tied to the concrete blocks with bolts and the concrete is attached to the slap with rebar and bolts. The roof is framed with 2x6s and braced with 4x6. I have no idea how this house would hold up to an EF5, but I've seen similar homes in EF1's come out almost unscathed with just the plywood from the roof riped off. I've seen new wood frame homes with brick with leaning walls after an EF1.
Interestingly enough, I don't know if builders even make concrete block homes anymore, and if they do, I'd imagine they are quite expensive.
I don't think we should be giving people a false sense of security, but at the same time, I think we need to have at least one area in the home, shelter or not, that they'd have a chance of surviving in an EF-4 or 5 tornado.
I have no delusions in our current home that if it got hit by an EF1+ tornado, the house would be moved off of its slab.
But of course. News stations stay on the air from ratings. If they get a chance to "advertise" they have to take it. Quite honestly after watching Dan Satterfield for a long time on WHNT I stopped watching. I distinctly remember him (in the middle of a tornado) constantly stopping the coverage to ask someone to go check on his wife. By the time he told us where the tornado was, it had passed my house.
Brad has been pretty consistent on keeping the coverage focused on all of us. Quite frankly if I had to put my life in the hands of a weather reporter it would be Brad Travis over anyone on WHNT or especially anyone over Channel 31. Just me though.
I've been watching Brad since I moved up here. The only time I saw him ever get "out of sorts" was when the EF5 Tee'd off their dopplar and headed toward Harvest and Anderson Hills.
Brad has the ability, unlike some meterologists, to convey the seriousness of the situtation without illiciting panic. Some get way too excited or even emotional as they are covering the storms. I dislike Jim Cantore for the same reasons when it came to getting out in Hurricanes. Thought he was a crack pot.
Brad's facebook page may give him more time to reflect than some of the on-air on-site reporting has. FWIW, We were flipping channels during coverage, and if anyone came across as unflappable it was Spencer Denton. I was quite pleasantly surprised how professional without being over-the-top or directive he has become. I sometimes think it is a requirement to own a WHNT football helmet to watch coverage on that station, and I was beginning to feel that on WAFF as well. Anyway, on to the thrust of my post:
What was telling in the Limestone tornado was that the only two killed were two that refused to get in a shelter. The reports of the people from the trailer park was that they were all UNSCATHED, while there were people in homes that were injured enough to go to the hospital. It doesn't get much clearer than that, and it points out why I was disturbed with his focusing on anchor bolts and such.
Time then to move on to my second point. With stick-built homes, code can only serve to LIMIT damage during the less potent tornadoes. I know of no stick-built home that has a chance of "reasonable" damages in an EF-4, or not being blown away with a direct hit by an EF-5. Wood and the folded steel that serves as studding have NO CHANCE against such forces. Reinforced concrete CAN keep structural integrity, but this is not an area where such construction is common in residential, and builders would likely not do a proper job. After Hurricane Andrew in Florida, there was a rather infamous housing development in Kendall that had been constructed of stick-built materials instead of concrete as was the norm. The entire development was completely destroyed, while the CBS structures surrounding it remained standing. My point then is that with any common construction used here, a tornado is going to cause damage - sometimes extensive and expensive damage.
Point two leads into a third point, one that will simply make the brains of some people spin in their skulls and turn into overcooked instant grits. There are multiple ways of responding to the idea of living in a tornado area. Some may be more financially prudent than the accepted norm. I'm going to show two extremes to illustrate.
There is a home on Cairo Hollow Road (currently for sale on ValleyMLS) that friends drove us by when we first moved to the area. The comment was that the owner had built a mansion that had cost him well over a million dollars to build, and that it was way overbuilt for the area. Cost to rebuild it after a tornado would be roughly $1,000,000 and I am certain that the insurance reflects that.
The real value of a used mobile home as shown appears to be in the $10,000 range. I'll double that amount to account for moving and setup, basic financing, etc. 40 homes x $20,000 = $800,000 to put forty families back at home.
In other words - the cost of getting things back to normal for over eighty people in that park is LESS than the cost of replacing the SINGLE home on Cairo Hollow Road.
There is further social consequence. Many people who live in trailer parks do so because they cannot afford more expensive housing. Those people include disabled veterans, retirees, people struggling to make ends meet with minimum wage jobs.
Limestone county has become a safety valve for thousands of people by not enforcing code on residential construction. I have already demonstrated that the fallacy of stronger construction to code will save lives in tornadoes. IF ANYTHING THE FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY WILL GET MORE PEOPLE KILLED. The results are already here for people to see. Cheap trailer park housing - the only two killed were the ones not in shelters. People in homes - numerous injuries. Thankfully this time there were no other deaths in the county.
What code enforcement will do is take away the opportunity for many people to own their own homes and not be a burden upon the already strained social services of the area. What code enforcement will do is add more employees to county payroll and raise expenses. What code enforcement will do is slow construction with inspection delays, adding costs. What code enforcement will do is leverage the intrusiveness of insurance company requirements for coverage.
Highly populated areas, such as Athens, do have need for standards and zoning. The benefits to the community as a whole offset the negatives that I have just pointed out. The same does not hold true for the sparsely populated county.
So what does happen with windstorm codes? You have only to look at south Florida to see the code creep that happens over time. The original enhanced Dade County code for construction in hurricane country was a well-considered response to hurricane damage. I applauded its adoption. Then the creep began, just as we were moving out of the area. I had the original requisite metal storm shutters of the appropriate thickness and strength, and approved attachments. First, the attachment clips were outlawed, then - in order to be approved - the manufacturers had to pay to have their shutters tested and get a Dade County seal of approval. It didn't matter that shutter metal is easily verified as being the correct material and thickness, governmental flummery and graft began its inevitable rise. A quick glance at the Florida forums will now show how numerous people are finding out that their homes will not get re-approval under increasingly strict standards, and their insurance rates are becoming untenable. What was a reasonable and decent concept has turned into an excuse to separate homeowners from their money on a number of different fronts.
Brad from WAFF gets paid enough that a slight increase in his costs of existence have little or no impact. What he is not taking into account is that he is not representative of the area - an area that has just lost a major paper mill impacting hundreds involved with logging, that had a manufacturing facility pull out a few years back, that had a railroad car manufacturing plant flop, and been majorly affected by increasing gasoline and food costs. He has not had the experience of code creep, or skyrocketing insurance costs. In short, his good intentions stand to do more harm than good.
His stressing the need to USE storm shelters would be far more productive and save more lives.
Even if a house I were buying included a concrete safe room, I would still install an underground shelter. I have seen too many above ground shelters that are not properly reinforced and will not stand up to an EF4, let alone EF4. False sense of security, IMHO and no real way to actually verify the construction of the shelter and how it is anchored. I have seen builders just build cinder block rooms and not even anchor them to the existing foundation with re-bar...mortar alone is not going to keep a cinder block room from blowing away in a strong tornado.
I do agree with Brad's assessment that all builders should be anchoring sill plates to a slab with bolts and nuts, not just pounding in square nails.
If it were code then it would have to be inspected and signed off. This idea that underground is the way to go is a myth. What if you are trapped in the underground in your garage and it start filling with water due to a break in the water line or flooding?
If it were code then it would have to be inspected and signed off. This idea that underground is the way to go is a myth. What if you are trapped in the underground in your garage and it start filling with water due to a break in the water line or flooding?
If it were code then it would have to be inspected and signed off.
Whoop-de-flip! A piece of paper. I could hold that up to the tornado and say "SEE! I have a piece of paper! You can't touch me!"
Underground is not a myth. Already amply disproven that it is a myth.
There is a reason that storm shelters are commonly built in open areas - sometimes with mounded dirt around them. Ours is in the middle of a field built into the side of a hill. I do agree that a shelter under a garage is not the best idea in the world.
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