When City Bureaucrats Go Wild

Various cities around the Twin Cities are debating raising the standard for garage door strength, noting that in many suburban tornadoes, the real damage begins when the garage door blows out.

When high winds, especially tornado winds, hit a typical suburban house, the failure of many garage doors to withstand the force can become the first link in a disastrous chain reaction. Minnesota has moved in recent years to require somewhat stronger construction standards for doors, but communities elsewhere have gone further.

The theory is that the failure of the garage door makes the rest of the garage a wind scoop. causing greater damage to the house and sending huge parts of the garage sailing into neighboring houses.

Some communities are answering by requiring the doors be able to withstand a 90mph gust, up from the current standard of 80mph.

Some question whether stronger garage doors are worth the additional cost, since no door can stand up to the full fury of nature.

Er…I’m no engineer, but why not just build a panel into the back of the garage that blows off (hinged downward, so as not to fly across the impeccably-maintained lawn and smash things) at 95mph, relieving the pressure inside the garage?

Would it not be cheaper than building armor-plated garage doors?

6 thoughts on “When City Bureaucrats Go Wild

  1. Cheaper still would be telling the contractors to use HurriQuake nails when building houses/garages. They add $15 to the cost of the house but contractors hate them since they’re difficult to rework when the carpenters screw up.

    Just as an FYI, when the hurricane hits your house you aren’t in trouble until the windows break out, at which point the roof tends to pop off and the walls come tumbling down. Which is why hurricane straps are code in hurricane prone areas. We found out which builders built to code down in Florida when Andrew came rumbling through (hint: not many did). Requiring hurricane straps on the garage here would be pretty cheap, too.

  2. Did you see in the St Paul paper last week…..suburbs don’t have enough affordable housing because building regulations make it impossible to build an affordable house.

    It must make liberals heads spin like crazy. They want to over regulate how I build my house, then complain because my builder can’t make a house that those of lower means can afford because of their regulations.

  3. Better fasteners are a good start, but even better is to remember that all those “dramatic” doorways and such work a number on the robustness of a stick built house.

    Regarding our host’s idea, a 95mph breakaway panel might be problematic as it ages–after about 10 years, homeowners would be nailing it shut (with Hurriquake nails) because of the nuisance factor.

  4. Installing hurricane “straps” (we called them clips) really isn’t that expensive. If I was building my own house I would do it. As far as regulating garage doors… all of these regulations start with good intentions. It’s probably not a bad idea, but I don’t really trust them to do it without making it onerous on people.

  5. Mitch,

    It’s not the pressure inside the garage. That’s a common myth. The pressure differential isn’t that great, and houses and garages are leaky enough that any difference is quickly equalized.

    It’s the pressure of a sudden gust pushing the door inward, bending the tracks, causing the door to fail. Then, with the door gone, the wind goes into the garage, and lifts off the roof.

    It happened in Fargo in 1995 with straight-line winds. A nearly-completed three-story apartment building collapsed into a pile of twisted lumber and sheetrock because the wind lifted the roof just enough–enough for the wind to start collapsing the interior walls. When the roof came back down, the walls couldn’t handle the weight, and the building fell on itself.

    A house is a system. The walls support the roof, but the roof ties together the walls, which are designed to handle downward forces (gravity), not lateral forces (wind).

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