Captain Tropic's
Hurricane Anchors
There are many different residential roof designs. Regardless of what styles you have, prefabricated roof trusses where more than likely used in the construction of your roof. This is where the problems begin. Each of these roof trusses are attached to the load bearing walls of your home. In the past little or no consideration was made as to the method of attaching the trusses to the walls. The only problem was fighting gravity, meaning keeping the structure from collapsing.
Many builders moved from up north or the mid west, into the coastal areas of our country because that's where the "work" took them. They had little or no experience with the high winds of a hurricane and failed to take this factor into consideration. To be fair they may not be entirely at fault. Homebuilders are faced with a number of problems that we as home buyers know nothing about. They have to fight the ever-changing cost of building homes. They also must work with ignorant building inspectors and out of date building codes, just to name a couple. Worst of all they must contend with the unexpected and unknown. The cyclical nature of hurricane intensities was not known to most of these builders.
In the not too distant past, roof trusses where simply "toe-nailed" to the header at the proper intervals. "Toe-nailing" is simply driving the nail into a board at a 45-degree angle and on through into the next board. While this sounds and looks good, it has been proven to be one of the weakest ways to connect to pieces of lumber. As a result when the hurricane force winds start blowing, the nails pull out, and the roof comes apart. In some cases the whole thing comes off in one piece.
Hurricane straps where created to over come this problem. They are made of good quality metal and are sometimes galvanized to prevent corrosion. They come in quite a large number of shapes and styles, allowing them to be used in different situations. If the wind direction and roof orientation is just right, the roof acts like a low efficiency wind foil, creating lift on the leeward side of the roof. This lift will try to pull the leeward side of your roof up and off. At the same time the windward side will be experiencing great downward pressure. As you can see your roof will be under great stress. If your roof fails, hurricane strength winds will enter your home, total destruction will then soon occur. As the storm passes though your area the wind direction may change by as much as 180 degrees. This means both sides of your roof may be stressed both ways!
As you can see hurricane straps will greatly increase your roofs chance of weathering the storm and fighting off all that stress. Now for the bad news, if your home was built before these straps were used it may be next to impossible to install them now without great expense. Adding hurricane straps in my mind is not a do it yourself project. So this may end up being one of the many factors you use to determine rather or not stay and weather out the storm or evacuate to another area.
In a effort to update this page I ran across a great new source of information. Home Depot and Lowes building supplies both carry a line of products from Simpson Strong-Tie Company, inc. Their address is 4637 Chabot Dr., Suite 200 Pleasanton Ca 94588. The graphics above are just a sample of their product line. I have used their hardware on a few of my projects here at home and they work real well. They state nails may be used with their products, but I found that good quality screws are better. They speed installation and I suspect may be stronger over all. You can visit their extensive web site at: http://www.strongtie.com/ they have a line of connectors used in hurricane applications: http://www.strongtie.com/fr_homeowner.html
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