With the 2007 hurricane season on the horizon, it is becoming increasingly clear that running out to buy plywood to put over your windows two days before the storm hits might be too little, too late.
News 13’s Scott Harris reported that researchers have found there are a lot of things homeowners can do to protect their house, but most of them are not last minute deals.
Experts say that a garage door can be a big problem. Any opening into a house can allow the wind to blow in and tear the roof off, a typical scenario for homes destroyed by hurricanes.
The trick, experts say, is to keep the wind out. Windows, doors and the garage door need to be fortified.
There are quite a few things you can do to protect your home. An organization in Tallahassee, Fla., does research and provides a lot of suggestions.
FLASH is an acronym for Federal Alliance for Safe Homes. The organization started as the Florida Alliance in 1998.
Florida has experience when it comes to hurricanes. The big one was Andrew in 1992, which led, eventually, to revised building codes.
According to FLASH, those new codes make a difference, but it also emphasized the codes are minimums, and recommend looking into what they call Code-Plus standards.
Code-Plus sets standards for construction details like how the roof is actually attached to the house and how the walls are attached to the foundation.
The starting point is to know your house and know its weaknesses. FLASH conducted a pilot program of free home inspections. The program is now called My Safe Florida Home and will be run by the state under the supervision of Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink's office.