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Male: Randy Shacleford (ph) is a Research Engineer for a company that manufactures structural connectors for the building industry. He explains how the business of reinforcing homes is evolving.
Randy: The concept is that that the wind is pulling on the top of the roof. You’ve got roof up lift and everyone has heard of that. So it’s been for a long time where people connect the roof to the top but what you really need to do is connect that all the way down. So it all starts at the top where you fasten the roof shedding to the roof framing. Then the roof framing is connected to the top plate and then everywhere there’s a joint on there is a connection together.
So we’ve got the top plate connected to the stud and then we come down the stud. The stud is connected to the bottom plate and then we’ve got a nut and extra large washer down here connecting the bottom plate to the foundation. So what we have is a continues load path toward chain and you want all the length in that chain connected together from the roof down to the bottom.
And the great thing about that is, is you can buy all the material to do that for about $200.00 from modest size house. Unfortunately one of the best ways to learn is when a disasters strikes, engineers go out and they look at the damage and we see what happened and they try and figure out what happened and then they take that knowledge back and then incorporate it in the building code. This happened earth quakes in California, after hurricane Andrew in Florida.
And I’m sure the same thing is going to happen here in the Gulf Coast, we will take what we saw and incorporate into improvements in both wind and flood resistance.
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