With Irma heading this direction, whether to stay or go is a difficult choice in many cases. There are those who have neither the resources nor the physical ability to evacuate and having pets complicates the situation. In looking at people who do have a choice, several things come into play, but let me focus on hurricane clips, also known as straps.

One of the good things to come from the terrible destruction of Hurricane Andrew was an in-depth study of what went wrong from a building code perspective (enforcement is a different issue). The Army Corps of Engineers was very much involved in the study and since I’m not an engineer, I’ll put this in simple terms. If a house is built so the walls and roof can remain intact as a “unit”, the odds of severe damage are greatly lessened. Some seemingly innocuous pieces of metal were developed called hurricane clips or straps and these are installed every so many inches on roofs in order to provide this “remain as a unit” effect. When we moved into our current house, the covered terrace was across two-thirds of the back and we wanted to extend that across the entire back. The company we used at the time had an architect who drew the plan to where you really couldn’t tell it was an addition. However, since it included a section of roof and especially because it tied into the existing roof, it had to pass code inspection. The inspector who came invited Hubby to come up on the roof with him and he showed him how the hurricane clips were installed (properly). Our house, like so many in South Florida, is of concrete construction with steel beams specifically chosen to meet the revised building codes for this environment.

Another important issue is storm shutters and I’ll save that for a future post.