IBHS’s Wind Resistance Research: Fortifying Structures Against Storms

Powerful storms happen more often in East Tennessee. These storms can damage homes and businesses.

At the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) building in South Carolina, the goal is to use the power of the wind to keep storm winds out. The buildings must be strong enough to keep air out.

“It wants to pull the roof up and the walls out.” Sarah Dillingham, senior meteorologist at IBHS, said, “Your house is trying to hold itself together. If the wind gets in, say because your garage door doesn’t close properly, it will go up, out the roof, and onto the walls.”

It’s more important than ever, Dillingham said, for this study. For some reason, they’ve been seeing more storms, more often, and farther east than usual in the Plains.

One example is the storm that hit Sunbright last week. “That means that we now have housing that is weak and more likely to be hit by these many dangers.” “That will only make the losses worse and put more people in danger,” Dillingham said.

That is, they are looking into why homes in Clarksville, Tennessee, failed in the storm. Dillingham says that when things change in nature, building rules may need to be changed too.

“A lot of people in the area were angry to see that ‘Hey, my wall-to-floor connections were very weak, and I shouldn’t have had these failures happen, why did this happen?'”

What’s most likely to break in your house is the garage door. Researchers said that holding up the door during a storm could save lives.

It only takes minutes to tear the house apart once the air gets in.

“When things go wrong like this, it’s a life safety issue.” “Those failures where the house moves off its foundation are called bottom-up failures, and they’re unfortunately when deaths happen,” she said.

Not only can we prop up the garage doors before a storm, but they’ve also found that closing all the doors inside the house makes it safer.