They couldn’t sleep. A hurricane was lashing their brand-new house with a torrent of wind and rain. Deborah Rodriguez and her husband were miles away, snuggled up in a hotel bed, but they could watch the drama unfold in real time: Their smartphones were connected to their home security cameras. The couple, from St. Petersburg, Florida, along with their kids and pets, had evacuated ahead of Hurricane Idalia last August.
Rodriguez stared at her phone screen. She was confident that her house had been built to a high standard—that it was designed to withstand exactly this kind of onslaught. But she wondered. Poring over the shadowy, shuddering footage of debris swirling around her garden in the dark, would she see a section of roofing come down? Siding fly off towards the street? Part of her wanted to look away. But the part that said “watch” was winning.
More than 30 million US homes, with a combined value of $8.5 trillion, are at risk from hurricanes. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which has just begun, is forecast to be the most active ever recorded. Tragically, some people—perhaps many thousands—stand to lose their homes in the face of savage winds and catastrophic storm surges. Residents of the Caribbean, and now the US, have already endured Hurricane Beryl, the earliest storm in an Atlantic hurricane season to be classed as a Category 5.
Even houses that don’t get completely flattened by tropical cyclones can end up requiring serious repair. Their contents might be ruined by rain that breaches a roof or blows in through shattered windows. In the face of rising hurricane activity, which is being driven at least in part by climate change, people who live in hurricane-prone areas are increasingly taking action to harden their homes against extreme weather. If thicker walls, better garage doors, and stronger roofs can help them face down the tempest, then so be it. These people want to be ready. They want their homes to survive.
About seven years ago, Deborah Rodriguez stood on the lot she had bought at the end of a street right on the waterfront in Shore Acres, St. Petersburg. The site was slightly curved in shape and, across the water, she could see a local nature reserve. This was a place for dolphins and pelicans. But people? Living at such a low elevation in a part of the country that has been torn up by hurricanes repeatedly might seem foolhardy. Not for Rodriguez. It’s the perfect place to raise her children. It’s warm and free of harsh winters, unlike her native New York.
“Yeah, we flood and we get hit by hurricanes over and over again, but it is well worth it,” she says. “For us, it’s just paradise.”
[PICTURE of Rodriguez’s house here]
The views from the lot were so great that she had the idea of building a circular house, so that each room would have a unique vista of the beautiful setting. Rodriguez started searching for designs online and soon stumbled on the website of Deltec Homes, a North Carolina firm that makes prefabricated circular houses. Best of all, realized Rodriguez, as she scrolled through the company’s marketing materials, the structures—with their tightly sealed roofs and walls pinned to the foundations—were designed to survive hurricanes. “I kind of feel like I struck gold,” she says.
It took years, and multiple headaches with local builders and contractors, but her home was finally finished last year. It was not cheap. The wall sections, roofing, and other core components from Deltec cost nearly $360,000, and the Rodriguez family shelled out a further $980,000 on permits, foundations, assembly, plumbing, HVAC, finishes, and fees. Significant hard work and saving helped the family achieve this, stresses Rodriguez. Building such a house in a dream location had become a “life goal” for the couple.
Hurricane Ian struck while the house was still being built. The structure was undamaged, though one patio door did get pulled off its hinges. The real test was Idalia, a Category 4 hurricane, which arrived in late August 2023. As it approached Florida, universities and airports shut down, National Guard members were mobilized, and a Cape Canaveral space launch was called off. The Rodriguez family hauled everything they could to the upper floors of their new home, packed up their car, and drove to a hotel in Orlando.
Their house never lost power during the storm, which meant Rodriguez could watch the effects as the hurricane drew nearer and nearer. The nighttime exterior was at first illuminated weakly by their security camera lights until the sun came up and the full force of the hurricane arrived at around 7:45 am. That’s when Idalia made landfall roughly 180 miles to the north.
“We could see the floodwater coming into our garage,” she recalls. But overall, the live footage didn’t look too bad. A relief. When they drove back to investigate the aftermath, they passed neighbors’ homes with pieces of siding missing or large parts of their roofs destroyed. The Rodriguez homestead was comparatively unharmed. Flooding in the lower story quickly receded, and while the family lost some belongings that had been stowed there, the house itself recovered from the deluge—as designed.
“We’re OK. We’re going to be fine,” Rodriguez remembers thinking on the morning they evacuated. “And we were,” she says.
Rodriguez explains that steel reinforcement bar, or rebar, runs from the home’s foundations, up through the walls, and connects to the roof. The balcony floor joists run right into the core of the property. And the windows, made by the door and window manufacturer Marvin, are designed to cope with hurricane-force winds and rain.
“Our survival rate is 99.9 percent,” says Steve Linton, president of Deltec Homes. “We have had two homes that have had structural damage in our history.” One of those was built decades ago, to somewhat lesser standards, he explains. The other “had some defects from the builder” and was battered by a Category 5 storm. To date, the company has manufactured more than 5,000 properties—mostly in the US, with some scattered across 30 other countries worldwide. The walls and roofing sections prefabricated in their North Carolina factory can be shipped practically anywhere.
The circular design is crucial, stresses Linton. It’s this that helps encourage the wind out and away from the structure, reducing the impact of gusts by around 30 percent. The roof is like a giant, horizontal bicycle wheel with spokes connecting the edge to the center—and everything is fastened with proprietary hurricane straps.
Deltec uses hefty southern yellow pine as timber, the extra-sturdy pieces sawn from the heart of these trees. “You get those really strong boards—that’s what we’re doing, we get the best of the best,” says Linton.
The company’s top-of-the-range structures are built to survive 190 mph winds, and Linton’s team is currently working on a 225-mph specification. Online reviews suggest that Rodriguez is not alone in being happy with her purchase from Deltec, though there are some negative comments here and there regarding lost deposits and workmanship from the company, too. “Like any company, we’re not perfect. Nobody is,” Linton says in response, adding that the customer experience is “overwhelmingly positive.” Occasionally people do lose design deposits if they can’t continue with a project, he explains. And sometimes pieces are missing from the shipments sent to building sites—but this only happens “once or twice a year,” according to Linton.
Distributing winds around the house with the help of a more forgiving, circular shape “makes sense,” says Gregory Kopp at the University of Western Ontario. The upper section of a dome, he suggests, would probably be the most resilient shape of all, aerodynamically speaking, since it would distribute the force of the wind most equally across its structure. “Wind wants to lift a house up in the air,” adds Kopp. “It’s like the same physics as an aircraft wing, the wind goes over the top, it wants to lift it up, so you have to counterintuitively hold it down.”
Extreme weather is threatening more places than ever. Kopp is one of many researchers concerned that some homes are currently extremely vulnerable to large storms. Seemingly small amounts of damage can turn into devastating losses, he points out. In hot, humid areas like the southern states of the US, when hurricanes blow a small piece of roof off, buckets of rainwater might pour down into the interior, causing mold to form on walls and soft furnishings in a matter of hours. “For the sake of one sheet of plywood,” says Kopp.
[Insert picture of hipped roof vs gabled here]
By reinforcing the structure, using hipped roofs rather than gable ends, or maybe even installing parapets—vertical barriers at roof edges—to keep off some of the sharpest winds as they race up walls, people can harden their homes effectively: “We do have the knowledge to build stronger so we can survive these events,” he says. “We should be doing that.”
On the wall of a giant hangar in South Carolina are 105 huge fans that can simulate the 130 mph winds of a Category 3 hurricane. It is the only facility in the world capable of exposing full-scale one- or two-story buildings to hurricane-like wind, wind-driven rain, wildfire ember storms, and intense hail in repeatable tests. The hangar belongs to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS).
[Insert IBHS video here]
“It’s still a kind of frustrating enigma,” says Anne Cope, chief engineer, recalling a test in which two mock houses inside the hangar were exposed to a strong, head-on wind. A camera captured the shocking moment when air flowed into the buildings and one of the houses—the one supposedly built to a higher standard—began to struggle. The lower walls soon buckled. “It just blew out the back door,” says Cope. “Quite surprisingly.” It took multiple repeat tests and investigations to better understand why the first test had unfolded the way it had.
IBHS’s gargantuan facility, six stories high, is necessary because you can’t really test how building materials and products cope with huge forces of nature properly unless you do it at full scale, says Cope. Test materials just don’t behave realistically when they are shrunk down. Since 2010, IBHS has conducted multiple different experiments. In another video shared with WIRED, wind blasted towards a single-story house causes the roof to separate from the rest of the building. The roof flies off, smashing into the apparatus above as it goes, before exiting the hangar. As though a giant had dislodged it with a vengeful kick.
While some tests have yielded perplexing results, others have revealed just how important things like a sealed roof deck can be for keeping out rain during a mega storm. Or that wind-rated garage doors can do a great job of preventing gusts rushing inside a house, which can result in the whole structure’s obliteration. Cope also mentions how asphalt roof shingles, popular across the US, are potentially vulnerable to hurricane-strength winds and that their resistance to wind decreases with age. Not every homeowner may realize this, she says. A metal or tiled roof might cost more, but their wind resistance will be more reliable as those materials get older, unlike the shingles, she points out.
The good news, Cope adds, is that the basic building materials we rely on—wood, concrete, steel—are in and of themselves very reliable. As long as they are in good condition, these are strong materials that can take a lot of punishment. “When they are connected together well, that can transfer the load all the way down to the foundation,” says Cope.
If you can afford to fortify your home or pay for a specially designed, hurricane-resilient residence to be built from scratch, that’s all well and good. But not everyone can. A lucky few, though, may receive help from one of the many US charities that repair or rebuild houses following natural disasters such as hurricanes.
“We put the words of Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount into practice,” says Kevin King, executive director of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS), a Christian charity. “Our faith is an action with a hammer.”
MDS is part of a coalition of volunteer groups, not all of them faith-based, called the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. A page on the MDS website proudly announces that most of the homes built by its volunteers in Louisiana’s Cameron area survived Hurricane Laura in 2020. Out of a total of 27 houses, 24 made it through the Category 4 storm.
“The homes that we’re building now can withstand up to 150-mph winds,” says King. These properties are built from scratch, elevated above the local floodplain, and donated free to people made homeless by hurricanes. MDS’s designs use hipped roofs, stilts for sufficient elevation if necessary, and 2 x 6 timber studs rather than 2 x 4s to give the property thicker walls and boost its strength.
Last year, MDS built 95 new homes at a cost of around $120,000 each, and repaired a further 400. King insists that his volunteers aren’t there to plant churches or convert people. (“If that happens, wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s up to God.”) Various socially conservative Christian groups collaborate on MDS construction sites, including Amish people. This results in some unusual contradictions. Digital photographs of the building process, which confirm the robustness of the structure, allow homeowners to apply for insurance discounts. King recalls a moment earlier this year when he watched an Amish volunteer, who almost certainly doesn’t have electricity in his own home, walking around one half-built house taking pictures of it with an iPad.
King himself is alive to the impacts of climate change. When he began his time at MDS 20 years ago, the organization would respond to around three or four disasters a year. “Here we are, 20 years later, and we’re getting a billion-dollar disaster on average every 18 days, versus every 80 days,” he says, reflecting.
It’s why access to hurricane-safe housing is only going to become more important as time goes on. Rodriguez says Deltec Homes should be subsidized to enable a broader range of people to buy them. Without assistance, the cheapest properties available from the company start at around $220,000 to buy and build, based on US national averages for the contiguous 48 states.
Although Rodriguez describes this year’s hurricane forecast as “terrifying,” she says that living in a hurricane-resilient house has given her peace of mind. She mulls the prospect of her family home facing down another hurricane, perhaps in just a few weeks’ or months’ time.
“I guess we’ll be visiting a lot of hotels this year,” she says. “And tuning into my cameras.”
