Beach Town’s Officials Crusade for Weather-Resistant Houses

SOUTHERN SHORES, N.C. —  “Just look at these monsters,” said Southern Shores Town Manager Cay Cross, pointing to dozens of new three-story $300,000-and-up homes on the Outer Banks.

To many vacationers, these homes represent the ultimate in beach houses, standing less than half a mile from the ocean. With as many as eight bedrooms and half a dozen bathrooms, the houses feature many windows, cathedral ceilings, large overhangs and gabled roofs.

To Cross, however, this “sea of houses” is a disaster waiting to happen.

“The way these houses are built is scary as all get out,” she said. The houses, constructed by a number of local builders, meet building codes, but the codes aren’t stringent enough to stand up to big storms.

“Just look at those large overhangs; they’re like Frisbees,” Cross said. “When the wind blows, they’ll want to fly. There are so many windows, there’s not enough structural integrity left to hold up a wall. You can push against the house and the walls will move.

“Do you see any shutters? If there are any, they’re just for decoration,” she said, adding that they’re certainly not large enough or strong enough to protect the windows in high winds.

Cross said she wasn’t singling out any particular housing development. “There are houses like these all along the coast from New Jersey to Texas,” she said.

Such houses have prompted Cross and other officials of this small Outer Banks town, with a year-round population of 1,600, to spearhead a national campaign to build stronger houses--”hurricane-resistant” houses that could withstand winds of 110 mph.

“We don’t say hurricane-proof, because there’s no such thing,” said Ralph D. Calfee, Southern Shores’ town engineer and technical manager of the project, called Blue Sky. “It wouldn’t be cost-effective to build anything that could withstand 175-mph winds.”

But, he said, there are ways to build houses to withstand 110-mph winds at a little extra cost.

“Our goal is to build a house that can remain habitable after a strong wind event,” Calfee said. There may be some damage, he said, but families would be able to move back in and not have their lives too disrupted. This also would help reduce the costs to local governments and relief agencies.

Cross began envisioning a project such as Blue Sky several years ago after seeing pictures of the devastation caused by Hurricanes Andrew and Hugo.

“There was a lot of cause for concern,” she said, especially in her community of 3,400 homes that rests between the Atlantic Ocean and Currituck Sound. It has been 30 years since the last major hurricane hit the area, Cross said. (Hurricane Fran saved its strongest fire for barrier islands and coastal communities farther south, although its effect was felt as far north as Virginia.)

“We’re painfully aware that we’re really in the bull’s-eye,” she said. “While we think we’re building well, we’re probably no better off than Dade County,” in Florida, which suffered billions of dollars in damage from Hurricane Andrew.

So when Cross happened to meet James Lee Witt, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in a hotel elevator at a National Hurricane Conference in 1994, she suggested a project to explore better building and inspection practices in hurricane areas. Witt told her to write a proposal. She did, and FEMA agreed to help out with federal money.

Today, Blue Sky has set aside $2.8 million--$1.2 million from FEMA and the rest from local government agencies, universities and 19 corporate sponsors, including such well-known names as Andersen Windows Corp., Home Depot Inc. and NationsBank Corp.

For Cross and Calfee, Blue Sky has no limits. They are interested not just in building better new houses, but in retrofitting existing ones--and not just to withstand hurricanes, but all sorts of natural disasters, including tornadoes, floods, fires and earthquakes.

Ultimately, Cross said, “we hope to have a training center in every state” to address local needs. The first, which is being built behind Southern Shores’ town hall, is expected to be completed early this fall. It features different construction techniques--wood frame, steel frame, concrete block--and shows how each can be strengthened and improved to withstand hurricane-force winds.

Other Blue Sky projects are underway in New York and Hawaii.

“We have to change how to build to cope with nature,” said Cross, who is Blue Sky’s program manager. “We’re not saying you have to live in a bunker or you can’t live where you want to live. We’re saying, build in a way so you can live where you want and in what you want.”

That challenge, Cross said, will require a whole new mind-set for builders, architects and engineers. For years, their chief emphasis has been to build houses to stand up against the force of gravity. “Now they must make the house stand down” as well, to withstand strong winds.

By numbers alone, the risks are “immense, just incredible,” Calfee said.

More than $3 trillion worth of houses sit within a mile of the coast, Calfee said. And every year, $69 billion worth of new beach houses are built. Within the last decade, annual U.S. property loss to hurricanes averaged $3.5 billion.

Hurricanes are hard on those structures. In Surf City, N.C., for example--about 120 miles south of here--Fran took out 20 oceanfront houses in a row. Disaster officials are still adding up damages.

In some cases, Calfee said, reducing risk may be as easy as using more nails in some critical construction phases.

For example, if roofers installing asphalt shingles use six nails instead of the usual four--and if they add some extra sealing cement--the shingles would be significantly more resistant to wind and would not fly off.

Not only would the roof be better protected, but so would nearby houses, Calfee said.

“Some of the worst damage we see from hurricanes is from debris flying into other people’s homes,” he said.

Meanwhile, to better protect walls with multiple windows, Blue Sky is exploring new assembly methods, such as installing extra wood support around windows. The windows could still break, but at least the entire wall wouldn’t fall down, Calfee said. “The extra cost of this would be incidental,” he said.

Still other solutions may require new equipment. For example, Blue Sky has been working with Simpson Strong-Tie Connectors, the largest manufacturer of building connectors for wood-frame construction, to develop a metal clip to allow builders to attach a rafter simply and directly to a stud.

In laboratory tests, the new “Blue Sky Hurricane Clip” has proven to be two to three times as strong as the current construction method, in which rafters are attached to the top plate that runs along the top of a wall and then the top plate is attached to the studs through a special clip.

Portable spray equipment also is being designed to enable contractors to spray a foam sealant under the roofs of existing houses to make roofs adhere better to rafters.

Whether it’s building a new house or retrofitting an old one, “our goal is to tie the whole house down to the foundation,” Calfee said. “The roof becomes part of the wall and the wall becomes part of the floor and the floor becomes part of the foundation, so the house is a big cohesive unit that won’t self-destruct piece by piece in high wind,” he said.

“The devil is in the details,” said Calfee, who added that he hoped those details would add no more than 5% to the cost of a new home.

But that small percentage translates into real money, builders said.

“We’re talking at least $1,000 for just doing a couple of the details Blue Sky is talking about,” said Outer Banks builder Randy Cartwright, who is on the project’s builder advisory committee. “If the house is large and involved and there are a lot of details, like a lot of gables, you could see the costs running up to $4,000 to $5,000.”

Still, Cartwright added, “Most of the things Blue Sky is looking at are definite problem areas. I would say most are worth it.”

Blue Sky is far from the first endeavor to build stronger houses. Builders are the first to point out that, for years, different builder associations across the country have addressed the issue and held numerous training sessions to share new construction techniques.

Given the federal and local government involvement in Blue Sky, builders also express concerns that the project will force costly changes in construction methods by mandating changes in building codes around the country--even though Cross and Calfee repeatedly have said their program is voluntary.

“Builders are always resistant to change,” said Skip Saunders, who as owner of Outer Banks Homes, which builds custom houses around Kill Devil Hills, also is serving on the project’s advisory committee. “Blue Sky will have to overcome that fact as well as the fear that it will add increased costs in places where we don’t need to add costs.”

Even so, Saunders gives Blue Sky high marks for being one of the first comprehensive efforts to try to take its message beyond builders to homeowners--through public-education campaigns and, more important, a number of different financial incentives that officials hope local governments, insurance companies and banks will adopt.

Among other things, Blue Sky officials are trying to encourage local governments to reduce property taxes or permitting fees for homeowners who buy or retrofit their houses after Blue Sky procedures.

At the same time, Blue Sky officials are talking to insurance companies to persuade them to reduce premiums or minimum deductibles. They also hope to persuade some banks to offer low-cost mortgages to homeowners who retrofit old homes or buy new, hurricane-resistant houses.

“In the end, the consumer has to drive the market for a better house,” Calfee said.