Stick-built is a cutsie way of saying wood-framed. Most homes, even brick or rock veneer homes, are wood framed structures. If the frame of the house is wood, the house is very vulnerable to floods, hurricanes, and tornados, mostly because wood is difficult to anchor to the foundation. Modern fastening methods simply do not make fast against extreems of pressure. If you make each structural member fast using steel plates and bolts, the wood fails. What you usually end up doing is moving the weekest link until you have a much better weakest link system that makes you feel better with far less money. Unfortunately, you are no better off if the surge waters or flood waters arrive and become knee-deep. A wood framed structure is simply no match and however strong the weakest link, it won't be strong enough. Failure is failure. You get no points for lasting the longest.

When retro-fitting the unsuitable structure for a hurricane environment, I much prefer adding a separate system or add-on and putting up defenses away from the structure that weakens any threat to the structure. I strap a house down, buttress trees, and erect wave trippers and surge disruptors. In some areas, barriers to ward off or stop debris rafts. If I have my way, the pitched roof goes in favor of a load-bearing flat roof that serves as a deck or garage. A second story is sometimes possible and always nicer than an attic. Observation decks are much better on top of a second story.

For those who want to keep their traditional roof, rope strapping is much cheaper and lends itself to a do-it-yourself project. More importantly, strapping over the roof works, or at least works to keep the entire structure and its contents on the property. Stick-built homes simply should not be built in flood zones, and absolutely not in hurrican surge zones. I question their suitability in high probability tornado areas.

I question the wisdom of building a house that can't stand up to the environment the house will be a home in. Is a home that doesn't offer shelter really a home. If you build a proper home, would that home need any insurance?

It shouldn't, but we buy insurance to cover the unexpected and extraordinary. We should not be using insurance to hedge a bad bet or stupid gamble, but the insurance being offered today is of that type and dumb insurance in my opinion. Offering dumb insurance only encourages people to do dumb things on a mass scale, setting up the mass catastrophe such as we saw post Katrina. Don't do what everyone else is doing just because you can, but you already did or the people before you did and you bought the place, so what to do?

You MUST secure your pitched roof, and your roof MUST pull down hard and firm on your house rather than do what it wants to do in a high wind, which is lift off and fly after creating a partial vacuum inside the house which is the last thing your house needs. Any pitched roof will work with the hurricane and against you and your house. A flat or dome roof can at least be neutral, but the flat roof can be made to help. For one, you can't put a pool on any other kind of roof, nor park a truck up there.

Wood support members under a great down load are less vulnerable to any side load. The greater the load, the less a side load matters. The reverse is also true, but under a heavy load, the stud walls are far less likely to slide off a cap or sill plate with or without fasteners. We could pile sand bags on your roof, toss a few old tires up there, maybe a floor safe and a junk car or two, but a cleaner simpler way is the rope way. Strap that bad puppy down.

The rope way has you repeatedly throwing a bite of rope from a continuous reel over the roof for a twenty-foot section so that the bend in the bites hang six feet below the eaves on both sides. You run a steel pipe through these loops on both sides of the house, then hook this pipe in three places that are connected to anchor points. Turn-buckles can tighten down on this roof rope strapping and be made even more effective with long planks laid under the ropes along the long axis over the shingles. This will help keep the shingles down and prevent sheathing panels from lifting in areas that are beyond the ropes. The planks extend the strapped-down section and joins sections. A sewer pipe cut lengthwise and laid over the ridge helps the rope slide to equalize strain and protects shingles. You may need to lay two-by-fours on edge near the edge to protect the gutters from the rope.

You might need to do several sections, but figure $1,000 per twenty-foot section, and this figures in six dead-man anchors with heavy-duty turn-buckles per section. The rest is a thousand feet of 1/2" braided nylon rope, the wood, and the concrete. Once the system is in place, setting up a rope-strap section will take two people an hour or two to accomplish. You may want to do this one time for each hurricane season or put it up only when a hurricane threatens. This is a mitigation you put up and take down whereas other ways are modifications on the structure that you have done by a contractor and forget about until you need a lawyer.

Roof rope-strapping done in this manner also serves to provide a good barrier to stuff hitting your house. This can be even more effective if long boards are weaved into the ropes that hang down below the eaves. This can be much better than shuttering the individual windows. Wind and waves that encounter this barrier get thoroughly disrupted, but I wouldn't count on this to stop a large debris raft, a flying boat, or a floating house.

To stop or divert big things you will need a bigger thing in the way, and this big thing needs to be set deep in soil, possibly in concrete. Big trees make good big things, but they will need buttressing and root ball anchoring. Tall pines should be topped, for when well anchored and tethered with guy wires or tree poles they tend to snap high up. Those tree tops can severely damage a roof. If there is a chance it might, top it. Broad branching leafy trees may need some trimming, but the less you do, the more disruptive that tree can be. In general, trees are good for everybody and the more the better.

A well-anchored tree can support other trees by connecting them all using poles with straps. Tree trunks can be buttressed by leaning poles and/or anchored guy wires. Trees can also be inter-connected using rope or cable and eye screws. Pole connectors help trees resist pulling or pushing forces whereas rope or cable can only resist pulling away from each other.

Barriers can be attractive, like a cluster of pilons wrapped in crusty old mooring rope with a wooden pelican perched on top. Real or artificial boulders add a nice touch to the landscaping. A large concrete planter full of greenery can pass for a planter. Concrete pipe sections standing on end and filled with soil do a good job of stopping everything that isn't wind or water. A line of these can be a good line of defense, and out buildings such as sheds and shops can be and should be made of concrete if for no other reason than to keep them and their contents on your property. Strategicly placed they add to your defense and don't need to appear unsightly. Debris is unsightly.

Other physical barriers can be built to ward off damaging stuff and/or large waves. A good inexpensive way is to build a birm using two sheets of heavy plywood spaced two to four feet apart and filled with tamped earth mixed with branches, rubble, metal junk, and old wire. You can remove the form and use cement and rocks or bricks to put a face on this immovable object. Repeat the process to form a barrier wall on your most vulnerable side or corner.

To make a tall wall, stand the plywood on edge, but to go above four feet, you'll need a wider base than two feet. Figure three feet to go to six and four to go to eight. After pulling the forms, mound up soil all around the base. Grass will help check erosion. Done right, strategic bunkers alone can save your place and ass, but in a defense they form the key element and will be the least likely to fail if you guard against current erosion with a tight well-rooted sod.

The formed bunker or birm line can still serve long after the waters rise to cover it as the mound would then serve to break waves by causing waves to break. A broke wave is a slap with a powder puff compared to a fast-moving breaker with no bubbles in it. What is better than breaking a wave is sending a wave back where it came from, which slams him up against his incoming buddies. Each encounter takes a little out of each wave, which is why sea walls do such a great job of blunting the force of angry waves. Waves that leap straight up even take a lot out of the wind and helps push the fast winds up higher.

Immovable objects cause hurrican winds to reverse, pitting wind against wind causing disruptions in straight-line wind streams. A strong steady wind encounting a mass of these must climb over the top. Collective ground clutter kills a hurricane rather quickly. That which stands against the storm helps destroy the storm. That which fails helps the storm destroy. If all things stand against the storm, there is no disaster. When all things fail, there is catastrophe. Community goal should be: Zero debris; everything stands; nobody dies.

The steel re-inforced concrete wall also works well to thwart the forces of Ma Nature, and the best form is the curved form. Monolithic curved walls rely less on foundations to stay up, and the greater the arc, the taller you can take them. Back-filling the home side of this wall will help a great deal, and putting holes in the wall won't hurt and will make the wall useful to display potted plants that love climbing all over walls. Instead of rudely terminating the ends, stair-step them or run them into trees. Make it look like something you ordered to spruce up the place. When it serves to save the place, look surprised.

A great effect can be created by placing a curved wall at your weakest or most vulnerable corner, then running beams over the top to connect to the house for an arbor effect over a walkway. This together with rope strapping may be all you need, but the more defenses you put up, the greater your odds of saving the structure and the contents. Avoid the temptation to say, "This should be enough," or, "This aught ta do it."

In all things real estate it is location, location, location. Never truer than when designing a defense against hurricanes. You must know what the house you are defending may have to face, and from which direction this threat is most likely to come, and in what other directions it might come. Leave any area undefended, that will be the direction it comes.

Number-one priority is save the roof. Loose that, you have lost the war. Save that, and it'll be awfully damn hard to get your house to fall apart. Damn near impossible if your roof pulls down hard on your house and isn't just fastened well. Fasten a roof super good and watch in amazement as your entire house leaves the slab to go floating off toward a man proud of his brick house with storm shutters and hurricane roof. He will be awfully pissed at you, but you might be awfully pissed at other neighbors. Rope strapping with stout outer defenses cures that. Dumb neighbors can't hurt you, and your house is not leaving your property. It'll all go around your house to assault the brick house, then you and Mr. Brick can curse them.

There is much you can do to prepare a stick-built house to weather any tropical storm, but your biggest threat comes from the hood you are in. It is well and good to have a good defense, but a hurricane is a full frontal assault on an entire community or group of communities. Being A defender is far better than being THE defender, and having A defense is way better than having the ONLY defense.

I can't say enough about the need to disrupt hurricane winds and waves. Left unchallenged these two forces join forces to destroy, then take that which was destroyed and use it to destroy more effectively. The wind and the waves MUST be challenged, and you must not allow your stuff and your building materials to join forces with the enemy. When you design your defenses, pretend you are trying to stop tanks from cutting across your property. When people ask you what you are doing, tell them that, because if you tell them you are challenging a Katrina, you will be thought a fool.

I challenged Katrina in Waveland south of highway 90 and beat her. My ten people, their six pets, and all of the buildings in my charge survived. I know what I am doing and talking about, and I believe in my ways enough to put my life on the line to prove the validity of challenging hurricanes. Katrina wasn't my first hurricane and it won't be my last. I would do it again and will do it again. I will keep on doing it until someone notices, but I would rather they notice your home standing alone amid the debris to ask you where you got those bright ideas. We begin winning when this site gets hit a thousand times a day. Right now, we are not winning.

Hurricanes need not be a disaster and they certainly don't need to be a catastrophe, but follow the FEMA guidelines to one or the other, and contractors will be happy to help you, as happy as the insurance companies are to insure you. Happiest will be the lawyers and the rats.

The next article deals with community self defense, a martial arts for hoods. A future article will address the contents of your home and ways to keep your stuff dry. After that, I'd like to write an article for those who have a well-defended property and plan to ride out the next storm. I wish I could decide who should and who should not, but I wouldn't want that responsibility. I will advise those who shouldn't, and my advice is free to those preparing a defense.

Email plans and pics.