On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:33:38 -0500, the infamous Swingman
scrawled the following:

On 3/29/2010 6:13 PM, Lee Michaels wrote:
I am really curious as to the effect of having hurricane ties and/or better
fasteners would have had on those houses. I know, you get hit hard enough,
almost nothing will standu up tothe force. But I saw houses that the second
story was removed. Would a stonger tie-in to the first story have prevented
that?

Most of those houses looked like they only lost pieces of roofing in
the center of the roof or room, rather than the top half of the house.
Most probably did have the hurricane ties in 'em. When windows got
hit and blew out, so did the roofs.


One of the big things in high wind areas is the proper installation of
"shear walls" for resistance to lateral forces, aka wind and earthquakes
... we even have a separate inspection for that here, and it gets all
the way down to the nitty gritty of the nailing patterns on the
overlapping sheathing between the first and second floor exterior walls.

Most definitely something to take into consideration when designing a
structure, as every little bit or mitigation helps.

Do you use the Simpson Strong-Wall(tm) shear wall panels in those,
Swingy?

--
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.
-- Earl Warren