Sunday, July 31, 2016

Protection strategies: how to keep your dream home from blowing away.

Belize does not have a lot of fires, but when they do, it tends  to be devastating:  in San Pedro, an entire city block was lost recently,  displacing twenty businesses and two hundred residents. This fire highlighted numerous weaknesses in the local  fire protection strategies. Indeed much of the fire fighting was provided by local residents forming a bucket brigade. You'd think that living on a island, less than 1,000 feet from the ocean, getting  water  to the fire should not be an issue,  it was.  

The message in this for home buyers in Belize is that prevention and protection are key in ensuring your home survives when municipal services cannot provide adequate protection, and most of the time they can't.  The level of standards enforcement you might expect in Canada does not exist in the Caribbean, as a buyer you need to be much more diligent to ensure you are getting what you need.

More devastating even  than fire is wind:  Belize is a hurricane prone country and is on par with  South Florida. In 1992 hurricane Andrew  made landfall in Miami Dade County as the strongest hurricane in US history,  it did an estimated 26.5 billion dollars in property damage.  Hurricane Hattie struck Belize in 1961 and virtually wiped out the capital Belize City.  After Hattie, the capital city was relocated inland to Belmopan which is approximately forty miles from the ocean.  Fires strike without warning, hurricanes are monitored and warning systems are in place, still, property damage is significant in both. Strategies to stay safe and limited damage are key.

After hurricane Andrew, the building codes in Florida were substantially modified to include serious wind mitigation strategies. These strategies have proven themselves  worth including in any new construction in severe wind locations.  People who own vacation properties can be forgiven for not thinking about hurricane mitigation strategies; the beer is cold, the sun is hot and the clothes are, ideally, skimpy at best. Yet, there is nothing worse than learning you lost your favorite flip flops and roof in a hurricane while you are defrosting your windshield in Edmonton. When hurricane  Blanca hit Cabo San Lucas, Mexico  in 2015, a number of my friends   had sustained severe damage to their homes, and the locals had, in many cases, lost everything. Ex-pat relief efforts, both formal and informal are helping put Cabo back together.

A serious examination of the risks you face when buying property in hurricane zones is key to staying sane. It should come as no surprise that the single largest cause of damage in Cabo San Lucas was the lack of integrity of patio doors. Those glorious expanses of glass where either blown off their tracks or broken by projectiles. Once the windows go, the increased air pressure in the home can cause total structural failure. It does not matter what floor you live on.

Simple strategies:
  • Remove projectiles when you aren't home or at least  secure furniture, plant pots and the like.
  • Install easy to operate hurricane shutters.
  • Ensure all doors and windows are hurricane rated and  made of impact resistant glass.
  • Burglar bars may not look attractive, but they will keep most projectiles, like tree limbs and furniture from breaking the glass.

More complex strategies:
  • Avoid gable roof construction,
  • Look for  tie downs that fasten the roof framing to the walls.
  • Carefully evaluate wood frame construction in coast areas.
  • Make sure that garage doors  have wind resistant bracing and a hurricane rating.
  • Use the Dade county Florida building code as your guide.
All this costs money, history serves a lot of good lessons here. The Ancient Mayan civilization was, if nothing else, a civilization of builders. Kings were constantly changing temples, adding stones to cover last years stone work and a thousand years later a lot of it is still in pretty good shape. It was perhaps Mayan slaves who discovered that burning limestone, mixing it with sand and making a paste of it was pretty good  for smoothing out the gaps between big stones.  Their work stands as a testament as there no recorded insurance losses payable against ancient Mayan temples.

The Mayans who weren't kings often lived in very humble, structures,  either mud wattle huts or the more common thatch playa, which is really just a bamboo hut lashed together with vines and covered with vertical sticks. Not fancy, they were ideal for the climate and if the wind took them, rebuilding was pretty straight forward.  Neither option, however, serves the big screen TV owning scotch drinker very well.

Somewhere in between invincible and disposable are  our homes.  When you live in a compromise property, and you do, you need to protect it to a reasonable standard. Experts, such as those who write the  building code  should be heeded.

On new construction  it is wise to ask very specific questions to the builder about wind mitigation strategies: This is applicable any place that can be subject to strong winds which is really everywhere, Belize is more interesting to contemplate because the climate is nicer than  say, Lethbridge, but it's all really the same.

The whole reason for a  building is to keep the weather where it belongs, outside. Were this not the case, we would likely all live in tents.  In keeping the weather outside, think about how the weather will try and get in and what kind of damage it will do once if it there.  In Edmonton the only thing that keeps you from freezing to death is the furnace and a 1/4 inch thick piece of glass.

In Belize its more of a "where did I put the sunscreen" problem,  but a problem none the less.

You won't freeze to death in the tropics, and undressing for the heat is a lot more fun than dressing for the cold but giving proper consideration to the forces of nature will give you an edge in having your investment survive an onslaught.  

Better yet, have your investment inspected by someone certified in wind mitigation, in Belize, that would be me.

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