How Winds Can Damage Your Home

8/31/2021 (Permalink)

High winds can damage your home 

As high wind speed moves through the community, they can carry debris from homes and buildings, which can contribute to the widespread destruction of properties. It is for this reason that it is essential to put in place preventive measures to prevent high winds from incurring damages on your property. Read on to learn more about how much wind your home can withstand and ways to strengthen your home from high winds.

How Much Wind Can Your Home Withstand?

Even though all properties are truly unique in their own way, they all have relatively similar structural features that help them sway with the high winds. As storms have increased in severity in recent years, many building codes have been updated to ensure that properties of all sizes and classifications can withstand strong high winds, thereby decreasing the costs associated with storm damages.

According to the NOAA, hurricanes start at 74mph which are then classified by specific categories (1-5). For wind speeds weaker than 74 mph, you can still note these characteristics:

• 19mph: the swaying of small trees.
• 25mph: one cannot use the umbrella, and whistling of wires and branches can be heard.
• 32mph: difficulty when walking through the wind and swaying of the whole trees.
• 39mph: branches begin to break from trees, and vehicles veer on the road.
• 47mph: small structural damage.
• 55mph: wind begin to uproot trees, more structural damages.
• 64mph and up; most structural damage.

As you can see, it’s not until wind speeds top 47 mph that structural damage is likely to occur.

Ways to Strengthen Your Home From High Winds

If you want to rest easier when high winds blow through your neighborhood, then start with investing in modifications to your home that help reduce damage from heavy winds, such as pressure-rated windows. If you get the right pressure-rated windows, your property could be able to withstand wind gusts of up to 150 mph (Category 4 hurricane). Any doors that are leading to the outside should also be secured with three hinges and should be anchored to the door frame with a deadbolt.

Turning your home into a wind fortress may be extreme if you aren’t regularly forced to deal with strong winds. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take simple preventative measures to mitigate potential damage from the occasional heavy gusts.

Restoring Your Home Following High Wind Damage

Following a high wind severe storm has rolled through, assess your property from top to bottom to determine if any damages have occurred. No matter when you end up sustaining high wind damages to your property, you can trust SERVPRO of Cookeville to restore your property back to its pre-storm condition. Call us today at (931) 528-9292 to request a consultation!