Homeowners Be Aware
Your home represents your most significant investment, and we're here to equip you with everything you need for successful homeownership. Whether you're a seasoned homeowner or this is your first purchase, "Homeowners Be Aware" will help you navigate the unpredictable world of homeownership.
Host George Siegal is a homeowner and documentary filmmaker with over 40 years of expertise. George's profound passion for homes and extensive knowledge make him the ideal companion as you navigate the triumphs and tribulations of owning or renting a home.
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Homeowners Be Aware
Disaster Prep Essentials for Every Homeowner with Roy Wright
February 20, 2024
123. Disaster Prep Essentials for Every Homeowner with Roy Wright
In today's eye-opening episode, we dive deep into the critical importance of preparing homes to withstand the wrath of severe weather and wildfires. George Siegal's guest is Roy Wright, CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. Roy talks about practical steps homeowners can take to fortify their homes against natural disasters. Discover the innovative testing methods used to simulate catastrophic conditions and understand why building to higher standards is not just an option, but a necessity. This conversation sheds light on the stark realities of disaster impact and offers actionable insights for enhancing home safety and resilience. Whether it's facing hurricanes, wildfires, or other severe events, learn how to give your home a fighting chance in the face of nature's fury. Don't miss this crucial discussion on safeguarding your most valuable asset – your home.
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X: https://twitter.com/IBHS_org
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Thanks for listening!
In today's program, you are going to learn some important things that you can do to save your home. It's one thing to talk about how a house will perform in a major disaster. It's another to actually see it put to the test. When you see a live example of wind or fire destroying a house, you get a clear picture of what's going to get destroyed and what has a chance of surviving. My guest today is Roy Wright, the CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. Their focus is to identify ways to strengthen homes and businesses to reduce damage caused by severe weather and wildfires. I'm George Siegal, and this is Homeowners Be Aware, the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. Roy, thank you so much for joining me today.
Roy Wright:It's so good to be with you, George.
George Siegal:Yeah, I really appreciate your time. You were in my documentary film, the Last House Standing. You played a big part of that film and I really like the work you guys do For people who don't know about you. Tell us about that amazing testing facility you have and the kind of things that go on in there.
Roy Wright:Yeah, so the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety I'll call it IBHS, but the Institute. It's been around since the late 70s, but about 15 years ago the insurance industry came together and said there's a whole set of things that we don't understand well enough about how mother nature crashes into people's homes, and we got to do something about that. We're in the wake of what we watched Florida 04, hurricanes, katrina in 05, and then Louisiana and Texas again getting hit in 08. And so they looked at wind, rain, hail and ultimately brought wildfire. I'll give you that moment. And so we're a nonprofit 501c3 Research Institute that is looking to fill the gap in understanding how the built environment performs against mother nature.
Roy Wright:So what do we do? We literally recreated mother nature in a really gigantic box. So just south of Charlotte, north Carolina, in Richburg, south Carolina, we have a facility. It imagine a six-story airplane hangar, but across one wall are 105 turbines and we can't each of those turbines six feet across. We can recreate cat three-ish up to some of the elements the gusts into fours of hurricanes, 135 mile an hour, hurricane elements, and we do all of this testing then against structures at full scale.
Roy Wright:There are other research places that'll build dollhouses and test them for pressure loads and that is an important role, I guess, in some of the science. But we don't do dollhouses, we do full-size structures in this space and we test the various dimensions against wind, wind and rain, as well as hail. And then we have a unique capability in the wildfire lane. Again, we're doing it at full scale, but we're the only facility that can recreate wildfire, ember storms. That's how those conflagrations out west occur Something burns and it becomes embers that start flying forward. Well, we recreate that and we can watch the point of attack from a structure to structure basis, have the wind dimensions brought in and, again, just the only facility that can fill those gaps.
George Siegal:Yeah, we used some of that footage in my film, the Last House Standing, and it's really powerful to see that. And it's even more frightening when you see how a house blows apart and you're saying category three may be close to a category four and then trying to imagine sustained winds in a category five, what that would do. It's really a powerful example of seeing all those forces at work.
Roy Wright:It is, and for us it serves those two purposes. On the one side, there's scientific information we need to collect so that we can design better, but the other piece is most of us, most Americans, cannot imagine that bad day. They can't imagine being pummeled by the wildfire. They can't imagine the cat three or cat four actually getting to them Someone else will get it, I won't and bringing people inside that risk in a way by which they can imagine it is one of the most powerful ways to communicate risk, yeah, and we've interviewed people from my current film that actually have lived through category four and category five hurricanes.
George Siegal:They've lost everything and you never want to end up like that.
Roy Wright:Anything you can do to avoid that, you want to do that worst day the one you can't ever imagine coming or invading your home, displaces so much of your family, disrupts so much of your life and really drives so much financial uncertainty. In short or not, there's so much that that brings to the table. It's hard and I think that we've got more and more work to do in the space to be able to build because we do know how to build to withstand much of what will come our way.
George Siegal:You were very close to the Paradise Fire situation. You had family there. How are they doing now? How is everybody?
Roy Wright:Yeah, so my parents as well as my brother lived in Paradise, California, before the fire came through. They lost their homes. They were insured and pieces have played out on that side. But you know, they temporarily moved to the next city over. But my mom came back. She is in a townhouse in Paradise. My brother is just north of the city limits in McHalea. They're really committed to the life and vitality of that community and it's really hard because they're not even they're nowhere close even to half of the tax base being back.
George Siegal:Wow that's pretty unbelievable because that was 2018, right, so that's been a long time.
Roy Wright:Yeah, it's a very, very long road to see the vitality and robust nature of a community's economy come back.
George Siegal:Now that kind of brings me to what I wanted to ask you for my next question, but we can also apply it to Paradise. When they built back, did they do anything different? I know wildfires different than hurricane, possibly and how you prepare, but is Paradise rebuilding with wildfires in mind? Because I'm not seeing that in Mexico Beach so much? I don't know about Fort Myers yet. We were down there because it's too early, but what are you seeing or what are they telling you about Paradise rebuilding?
Roy Wright:So Paradise is rebuilding back, very mindful of this risk. So they have the top end of the building code in place. They incorporated elements of defensible space and the certifications that are tied to that into their land use codes. Now they just need to have the patience and the stick-to-itiveness not to back off. Because I contrast Paradise with Santa Rosa, the coffee park at Tubbs Fire and 1,200 homes were lost in one community they built back because they were not in the map. Dairy that required the wildfire, the wooly building code pieces they didn't incorporate it. In fact they built the homes even closer together.
Roy Wright:And you watch this, that speed turns into haste. They have a near-term need to get the economy back, to get the folks in the community back, and I don't hold that against anyone. But these calamities come back. They revisit communities in successive decades and you gotta apply what you've learned. A good friend of mine from a retired professor, craig Colton from LSU, who loves to talk about lessons lost, because so few of the lessons and disasters are learned, they're observed and many of the lessons are just lost.
George Siegal:Yeah, that's a very powerful and true statement and we saw it firsthand in Mexico Beach when we went up there and we interviewed a gentleman who was a floodplain manager and he was telling us how they originally changed the flood level rating. They raised it up still not high enough that would have survived Hurricane Michael, but they raised it. But pressure from the residents by 2020 was so strong they lowered it again. So the code is nowhere close to what would withstand another powerful category five hurricane and certainly not a 20-foot storm surge. Why do you think that happens?
Roy Wright:Because politicians have a very short time horizon. So I watched this in Louisiana. So communities of Baton Rouge and Livingston had put in those extra layers of protection. So in their highest hazard for flood of their floodplain they put an extra three feet requirement of elevation. It says we're gonna build higher and they had had this in place for a number of years. And then there was a great day lose. That happened in 2016. They got 39 inches of rain on a day 39 inches and three months later they removed the requirement to build higher.
George Siegal:And there's some short-term economic drivers that I'll never win the argument against, but as I look over the life of just the next 10 years of living in that home, that is unwise very unwise and we see a lot of unwise up in the panhandle where there's one builder we won't name him, dr Horton who's doing a lot of slab-on-grade houses that are really close to the water and I understand that particular area. The flood designation isn't that high but we had a couple experts up there tell us water doesn't know where to stop. You've now seen 20 feet of water. It doesn't stop at A Street and not go to B Street, so it really seems like people are moving in from out of state. They're taking a risk and it just had the twilight zone, feeling that it could happen again there and be really bad.
Roy Wright:This is why building codes are so important. I know that for most people they think about building codes and like, oh, there must be some instruction book. They keep it city hall for the builders. Most folks just don't understand what it is and there are some instructions that are included there. But building codes are about safety and survivability. That's why they are in place.
Roy Wright:And you look in these elements that the point that a builder comes in to a community, you know they most have a three year time horizon on their investment, so they're concerned about the risk during that window.
Roy Wright:But then a homeowner they make this purchase becomes the biggest, most valuable asset they have and they now have to carry the entire tail of that risk. And so I look at whether you're putting slab on grade in a flood prone area, not giving the elevation you need not putting the right kind of wind loads and building for those purposes. We know those events not only can happen, but they will happen in that area. And so how do you get the private economy chugging in the right direction? You put the right Jersey barriers in place to nudge them in those places, because they know how to build more resources and build more resilient and there may be a small increment. It may add three or 5% to the cost of that home upfront. But that becomes value. That increases with the value home and lowers the operational cost, particularly in the case of insurance, let alone what it takes to rebuild.
George Siegal:Yeah, I wonder how many of these people are gonna get insurance. Now, all the houses that are on the water side of the highway seem to be elevated 10 to 14 feet, but now the framing is all wood.
Roy Wright:And I had an engineer tell us.
George Siegal:I don't presume to know anything as much as you guys. That's why I try to talk to people a lot smarter than me, which is a wide open field. They say when you're up higher the wind is actually stronger, that a woodhouse on stilts raised up might be more vulnerable up there and that they really should be building with concrete block. Is it crazy that they're building with wood?
Roy Wright:So it's not crazy that they're building with wood. What the science says is you need to design, you need to engineer for the continuous load path that's going to come. It has so much to do with the connections. It's less about the wall than how the wall connects to the roof, how the wall connects to the foundation pieces that are there. I hear you. You know, using concrete blocks appear stronger and they absolutely are strong. My dad was a bricklayer. I'm all on board down the ICF line of the equation, but I would caution us just to go oh, wood must be flimsy. If you engineer that structure and particularly deal with those elements, we can engineer a wood frame construction building to withstand those very high winds. It can be done. There's trade-offs and building approaches that are there. I'm a bit more agnostic on which approach you take Really firmly in the lane that says the continuous load path, which is how the floor, the walls and the roof all connect together so that you can let the wind circle around it rather than break it apart.
George Siegal:Yeah, you know, to me it's like seeing the house we featured in the last house standing, the one that survived on the beach. That was built out of concrete. It was tested in a category five. It survived. Everything around it did not. But they're not building back around that house that way. It's like you see somebody with a bulletproof vest that works, and then somebody comes up with a different vest and they go yeah, this should be okay. No, I would agree.
Roy Wright:I want the vest. That worked. Yeah, clearly the ICF approach is super strong if it's done properly, right. But you can screw that piece up as well. What I'll tell you about everything else that was in that neighborhood? Florida had pulled back on codes along the panhandle. They were designing to lower wind speeds. Just 200 miles away, they were employing different standards that they knew were better, but someone made a short-term choice, to use a technical term. There was a recency bias. I talked to folks it can't happen to the panhandle, right? We don't get hurricanes here, let alone strong hurricanes here. Which is to say, I haven't seen hurricanes here, I haven't seen strong hurricanes here, and your life is way shorter than history.
George Siegal:Yeah, and you've probably seen the pictures of that house in Panama City that has now blown over twice and it happened in January with a tornado. Do you know the picture I'm talking about? I've seen it.
Roy Wright:I have not been on the ground there, so I want to be cautious about coming to a firm conclusion there. And I'm not asking you for a conclusion, I just want to give you a thought, but what I will tell you is a building, a newly constructed building, should be able to withstand what came through.
George Siegal:Yeah, and right behind that building we got a lot of footage of that entire block of apartments that looked like they were brick but they were really old, that were completely leveled.
Roy Wright:Because of unreinforced masonry in a wind event we'll go down.
George Siegal:Yeah, so is there anything with newer construction of survived the kind of tornado that rolled through there? Absolutely.
Roy Wright:We know how to construct to withstand 135 mile an hour coming through. So, particularly EF-012, if you're using the high wind engineering that is available in this country, you can withstand. There's no question about this. You just have to choose to do it. You go down to the Miami-Dade standards that people talk about. Well, the reason why they talk about them so much is because they are so strong and, to their credit, they've been relentless about it, because they know what can come their way. Well, how do you take those pieces in the bottom third of Florida and pull them through? It requires political leadership, because we know these things can happen. But the kind of thing that came back through Panama City should have been survivable for new construction. Yeah, for that house to still like that.
George Siegal:You need to get down there and see it. It was unbelievable. We got pictures and video from the water side and the other side. It doesn't even look real. It looks like a movie set where they just tipped something over and then to find out it happened to them one other time. That is really bad luck.
Roy Wright:There is something about the workmanship there that I would ask some questions about. Yeah, there's no question about that Now.
George Siegal:Yet the other day I interviewed a gentleman who's the CEO of the Tampa Housing Authority and it was interesting what he told me. For their residents they're only building concrete block apartment buildings, yet all throughout Florida they're building huge apartment complexes out of wood. We saw it in the Panhandle, we saw it in Tallahassee and Pasco County and here in Tampa, like a mile from my house, there's a huge four building complex all of wood, right on the water. That seems kind of crazy.
Roy Wright:So I think that this is an element where I'll leave you to tell you that you get more value out of that. So I'll remain agnostic. I'm not going to tell you one is superior to the other, but I will tell you that when you do that block construction there's energy efficiencies, they pick up, there's absolute ability to withstand high winds, presuming that the roof is attached properly, because there's not a block roof on that structure. But I do think that that's a place where resilience and energy efficiencies, the sustainability elements, all come together and I hope we see more of that. I think, for the people who live in that new apartment building or complex you're talking about, they're going to see value. They're going to see value in their operational cost of heating and cooling. They're going to see resilience value in that space. They're probably going to see value on the insurance front.
George Siegal:That would be nice, and I had an engineer explain to me why what he thought the risk of wood was it's where, because of all the wind, where the stucco cracks and then water gets in. That's why Florida has such a bad termite problem because of water intrusion. So I hadn't really even thought of that, but it's like, wow, it's just another thing to worry about.
Roy Wright:Yeah, water intrusion is a very real concern in all kinds of construction, particularly around windows, whether that's the stucco around the windows or the like, your windows and openings are most vulnerable on that front Now on your on your research summary page on the website you rate states along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast based on building code, adoption, enforcement, contractor licensing.
George Siegal:Now Florida and South Carolina scored very well, but Texas, alabama, mississippi and Georgia did not get a very good score.
Roy Wright:They did not.
George Siegal:Why is there such a discrepancy with that?
Roy Wright:Because politically, they haven't chosen to do the right thing. It really is that simple. They have not chosen to do the right thing. We've gotten very close in a couple of rounds on Alabama to see a statewide code come into place. Maybe this is the year that the legislature will push it through. They do have it for their two coastal counties in Alabama, baldwin and Mobile, but they don't have it farther up. But those states that you see with those bottom-end scores do not have statewide codes.
Roy Wright:Let me give you this kind of perspective on codes, the genesis of building codes. It has become the basis of the international residential code, the international building code that comes from here in the United States. I think that most people think that their home was built to a code, that someone followed a set of guidelines. It's not an unreasonable thing to think, but it's not true. About 32% of US jurisdictions actually have codes in place and enforced today Only 32%, and the biggest bulk of that 32% is generated out of California and Florida.
Roy Wright:But it's this piece that, if you have a, if you buy a baby crib, you presume that it met safety standards and is not going to endanger your baby. Yet when we walk into homes where our entire family lives. We have states that are willing to go. Yeah, let them build what they want to build. You choose what you want. Just, it leaves me in this space. That goes I can't believe that the homeowner that comes in initially, let alone the second or third generation down of homeowner, has any ability to comprehend the kind of risk that they're taking on because wise choices weren't made out of the gate.
George Siegal:Yeah, I hear that loud and clear and I'm surprised people don't ask more questions. I think we assume well, this is a complicated thing. If they can build it, they must be building it right. But we do put much more concern in. I bet, I guarantee you, most people know more about the safety features of their car than the safety features of their house, and that house probably costs 100 times more.
Roy Wright:So another corollary though, on autos. People think they know about their safety features and they disproportionately do understand those compared to their home. But their car was manufactured at one or two locations in a controlled environment focused on unadulterated quality. Your home could be as many as 100,000 systems all being brought together. All different kinds of contractors came in and did their piece, combined in the next piece, the next piece, and then people start renovating those homes and expanding those homes. There is no integrated quality control going on in the place that you call home.
George Siegal:That's why the conductor, I think, is such an important role. It's either the superintendent on the job then the person who's in charge of them. You need to really interview your builder and understand where are they finding those subs? Who are the people that are doing all that work? Because every time I don't ask a question it always comes back to bite me and I feel like I'm somebody that should know better. So I imagine most people just assume they're being taken care of.
Roy Wright:They do, and this is why the fortified program that IBHS runs has become sought out in so many communities, because it adds a set of standards that require verification. So there's a roof dimension that is most prevalent, but a fortified gold designation that looks at the entire house on new construction against this wind and wind-driven rain risk. What are you doing with these pieces? And as I talked with folks, they go well. I think it's in my building code. I'm like no one checked it Like well, I'm sure there was a building inspector. I said do you realize that building inspectors aren't even allowed to get on the roof? I'm like their role is important. I'm not trying to set them aside, but they're not comprehensively there to see each one of the steps. And so in our fortified program we require contemporaneous pictures to be taken geotag to that location, show us the connection, show us the nail pattern, show us the sealed roof deck A little kind of Reaganesque view of it. We're going to trust, but verify.
George Siegal:Well, and I think that's so important. I wish everybody took advantage of that, because you just don't know, and in a lot of states the building lobby, the builders lobby, is such a powerful organization I know it was in Texas when I lived there that you can't even sue builders there. All you can get is arbitration out of it, and then they just go out of business and open up with a new name the next week and they're building houses again. It's like the Wild West and I think people have to stop rewarding that by buying those kind of homes.
George Siegal:Yeah agreed, but they're not going to do it based on me telling them They've got to be beaten over the head with that. So what can a homeowner do, then, to give themselves the best chance of getting a house that would protect them from a disaster?
Roy Wright:Yeah, learn enough to ask the questions To your point. Very few people buy in homes or experts in construction, and so the best we can do is give them the questions to ask that lead them down a path. So let's kind of walk down the perils in sequence. So, on wind and this is true for hurricane as well as tornado prone areas it's about the connections of the structure, and so you wanna make sure that the roof can withstand the wind. But if, particularly with asphalt shingles, you are going to lose those, and are you going, the question then is will you have water intrusion? There's a five to seven times multiplier on the damage if water gets in. So can you seal that roof deck and lock it in. But then I turn to your openings. The biggest opening in any home, the garage door. The garage door, when it's compromised, even subtly, it changes the pressure, creates a differential. That basically is a balloon that explodes. That's why the roof pops off. So what can you do? Ask about your roof, including what's under the shingles. You want a wind rated garage door. There's a sticker It'll tell you if it is or is not.
Roy Wright:We offer the fortified program. On those wind side of the equations there are homes along the Gulf Coast as well as the Carolina Coast that have these designations. You should have confidence if you're buying something that's in that space. We haven't talked about hail, but I think there's elements of hail about how you look and test and look at the testing that is out there about what can withstand hail, but I'll focus on wildfire. You can find out if it was built to the wildfire standard.
Roy Wright:It's, from a building code perspective, california leads the way there, but we've found that, because embers drive so much of the risk, that defensible space is everything which is the first five feet closest to your home need to be entirely noncombustible, and then five to 30 feet away needs to be lean and green, and so we've put together a companion to fortified on the wildfire side, called Wildfire Prepared Home. That is there to help prevent ignition from embers, so that when the embers do come and fly, they will land, smolder and extinguish, because once that pathway begins to happen and the house next to you is burning, you create that conflagration of dominoes that begins to move. You gotta change your perspective, though, about what you want a home to look like and what kind of questions you're gonna ask.
George Siegal:Yeah, there was an interesting article that I read about. With the Maui fire, one of the houses, one of the few houses that survived they had actually cleared a bunch of stuff away because of termites and the fear for something else. They weren't even thinking about fires, but they survived.
Roy Wright:Yeah. So I joined our research team on some of the post-event investigation in Lahina and more than one house survived. So the first thing is people see on TV the Red Roof house survived yes, it did, and some others did as well, but in the core area, more than 90% of the structures were lost. If they survived, defensible space played a really, really key role, To your point. They were driven by other things Termites. They don't really use a lot of gutters and so the water rolls off of the roof, and so people would have rock around their house so that you could collect that and move it out without getting mud. Well, that all created good defensible space in that space. The other thing that a few of the neighborhoods had, that homes were more likely to survive is the houses were spaced farther apart, which is to say, if the house next to you wasn't totally engulfed in flames, you had a survivable chance.
George Siegal:Yeah, I mean, that's just a horrible situation. I had a friend of mine on who lives over there on a previous podcast and he said it was just unbelievable that the place is still fenced off. You can't even get in there. Have you guys done much studying in how this escalated so bad and became such a tragedy? You know?
Roy Wright:there are others doing the forensic studies of the particulars on it. There's a grass fire that catches that they thought was entirely put out. There were some smoldering pieces of that that ignited, but really the tipping point happened when it got to structures, because once it got to structures, the structures became the embers that started creating the splatter of ignitions all over the community. And we watch this every single time in conflagrations. Fire will make its move however it starts, and sometimes it starts naturally, and sometimes it starts because of technological things that fail, and sometimes it starts because there are stupid human tricks going on. Whatever the ignition is, once it starts moving particularly over the day like that where the winds were as they were that smoldered ember then got fanned back up and started to make its progression. You get the first few structures and it creates that spider web effect. It was so devastating.
George Siegal:Yeah, I mean the stories they told of people. You know the fire department obviously couldn't do anything at that point, but people had to jump into the ocean to try to save their lives and everything. It's just another example of why you want to avoid disaster at all costs, no matter what you have to do.
Roy Wright:And being able to walk in some of the streets of Lahaina reminds me so much of walking the streets of Paradise, california. Some of the same experiences related to evacuation. I think the evacuation was better in Paradise it was at least there was an organization to it in that space but again just profound loss of life in ways that we just we must find better ways to be prepared, teach folks what to do and then to act.
George Siegal:Yeah, well, keep doing what you do on your end, because I know you guys are helping a lot of people with that kind of research and we're going to put the links, I guess, so people can find you guys and find fortified, so they can take advantage of all these programs.
Roy Wright:Yeah, and then we'll go to testorg. We'll send you to everything. Go to fortifiedhome. org. We'll give you the elements that are there. You can find us on the Instagram, the Facebook, the place formerly known as Twitter. All those kinds of pieces that are there. And all of that element is where we take our science and try to translate it for consumers.
Roy Wright:You're not going to stumble into the engineering differential equations. You're going to find some really practical things. It says this is what you can do. These might be the actions you take for just 500 bucks on a do-it-yourself. These might be the actions that cost you a few thousand dollars that if you saved up and had a contractor come in and do it, would better position you to withstand these disasters. We're not going to stop the disaster, but I am convinced we can narrow the pathway of destruction. We can get it to just the center point. If you're at the outer bands of the hurricane or tornado, your winds are south of 135. We can build to withstand With the wildfires. The ignition may happen on a bad windy day, but let's make sure that we don't get all the dominoes knocked over. Let's find a way and box that in. Let's narrow that path of destruction.
George Siegal:Great advice, roy. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Great to hear from you. George. If you enjoyed what you listened to today, please become a subscriber so you don't miss an episode. A new show comes out every Tuesday morning. There's also a contact form in the show notes. I'd really like to hear about your experiences as a homeowner, good or bad. Fill that out and you might be a guest on an upcoming podcast. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.