Safer Living Homes campaign

Nobody builds houses in a hurricane. And as obvious as this sounds, it leads to a less obvious outcome. What might seem like adequately strong home construction details when the weather's fine, sometimes prove inadequate when wind and rain get especially energetic. Encouraging the construction of stronger houses is the philosophy behind the Safer Living Homes campaign, and it's something you're going to see more and more often because our world is changing. Increasingly destructive weather events are a verified reality all over the globe these days. The fact is, disaster damage has been doubling every five to seven years since the 1960s, and a good portion of this trend affects houses. Windows blow in during hurricanes, shingles tear off during typhoons and roofs collapse under the weight of unexpected ice storms. In many of these cases, damage could have been avoided or greatly reduced if a few additional construction features had been worked into the design.

Safer Living Homes are the product of a partnership between The Co-operators and the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) - an organization funded by the home insurance industry in Canada. One of the many roles of the ICLR is to identify ways in which property damage and personal injury can be reduced through enhanced home design and construction practices. The Co-operators partners with individual insurance policy holders who've had their homes destroyed, offering to rebuild to enhanced ICLR standards at no extra charge.

So what's different about a Safer Living Home? Nothing that you can see in the finished structure, but plenty of important stuff behind the scenes.

Strong winds demolish thousands of homes each year, and this is why many of the Safer Living design features are built to make houses more wind-worthy. And it all starts at the foundation.

Instead of the traditional practice of bolting the bottom layer of framing lumber to the top of concrete foundations, Safer Living standards include the use of 1-inch diameter threaded rods that connect with metal plates screwed to wall studs. This combination creates much more vertical strength, enabling homes to resist wind loads that would flatten conventional walls.

If you've ever taken a close look at how regular Canadian houses are built, you'd probably be surprised to see how roof framing members are attached to the tops of walls. A few 3 1/4-inch-long nails per joint. That's usually it. And as long as high winds stay within the realm of normal (as defined by what's happened over the last 50 years), then you'll be fine. Safer Living homes, on the other hand, don't assume "normal" as it's been traditionally defined, and that's why each roof truss is secured with engineered metal hurricane straps. A few hundred dollars of extra hardware and the big bad wolf can blow all he likes. That roof isn't going anywhere.

Many of the Safer Living design standards are imported from the US-based Institute for Business and Home Safety. Safer Living Homes designed for prairie locations, for instance, include landscaping features that reduce the risks posed by grass fires. West coast variations include engineering to reduce the impact of earthquakes.

All this sounds great, but how much more does it cost? A Safer Living Home built by The Co-operators in PEI cost 20% more than if ordinary construction methods had been used. And given what you get, that seems pretty reasonable to me, but it gets better.

A good part of the added costs come because specialty materials and fittings had to be found. The 190 km/h windows installed in the PEI home, for instance, aren't readily available in Canada, though they were manufactured in nearby New Brunswick. Code-surpassing disaster-resistant housing is currently being built right now in the US for just 5% to 10% over standard designs now that material supply channels have been identified and opened up down there. The same cost reductions will happen here in Canada.

There will always be those pundits who brush off new ideas out of habit. That's just the way some people live, and you've got to feel sorry for them. But the reason today's new homes are so much better than they were 30 years ago is because other people saw the trends and reacted. The Safer Living design is based on the idea that it's better to have a fence at the top of the cliff instead of an ambulance at the bottom. And who can argue with that?