Staying safe in strong winds

Q. We are thinking about how to make our house safer from high winds. It’s old, and creaks when we get wind gusts. I looked online at safe rooms, and they’re a lot of work and cost. Is there a cheaper way to make a room — at least one room — safe to go to if we have a tornado, and can we make our house less creaky when windstorms blow?

A. My childhood was spent between elementary school in Orlando, Fla., where we regularly had hurricane days off from school, and then middle and high school in Toledo, Ohio, where a tornado actually hit our home when I was 12. Forty-three people were killed in that July 4th storm, while our family of six huddled in the southwest corner of our basement, the place we ran to every time the alarms sounded. Getting to a basement at the closest point to the direction the wind is coming from allows the house to blow over and away from you. We were lucky to live in an area where it was understood that you had to have a basement.
While I was producing and directing a documentary aptly titled “Hell or High Water” in 2013, I interviewed several survivors and officials in Moore, Okla., the scene of the highest winds ever recorded in a tornado in the U.S. The homeowners I spoke with described how there was no time to run, and they had no basements. At their building department, I met with the commissioner, who explained that the soil there is red clay, and so expansive when it’s wet that it would push basement walls inward. I told him I didn’t buy that excuse, because there are ways to buffer expansive soil with loose gravel in a cage-like perimeter that improves drainage around the whole foundation in addition to allowing for basement foundations. I also pointed out that the brand new homes still under construction across the road from the neighborhood where the tornado touched down had no reinforcement attaching the roof to the walls or the walls to the foundation. They were also using particleboard instead of stronger plywood, especially to reinforce outside corners. The commissioner looked at me sheepishly and said that most people there couldn’t afford it.
I noted that eight third-graders had just died outside their classroom. Was the lack of code-required connectors really worth it? I was elated that since we spoke on camera, with their permission to film, I might have had something to do with the announcement, in 2014 that Moore now led the nation as the first building department to require specific tornado-proofing methods, including the steel frame connectors for openings and wall and roof connections I mentioned.
If you can’t get to a low, reinforced room below ground level, the best thing to do is strengthen an area next to the masonry chimney. More on safe rooms in the next column. Stay tuned.

© 2022 Monte Leeper. Readers are encouraged to send questions to yourhousedr@aol.com, with “Herald question” in the subject line, or to Herald Homes, 2 Endo Blvd., Garden City, NY 11530, Attn: Monte Leeper, architect.