Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Tornadoes Uncover Substandard Construction Practices—Again

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        I can’t believe the news today
        Oh, I can’t close my eyes
        And make it go away
        How long…
        How long must we sing this song
        How long, how long…
        — U2

The North Texas tornadoes of 26 December, as tornadoes so often have, revealed bad building practices (regardless of codes) and stirred up a long-simmering cauldron in me regarding simple prevention. As with past events, such as numerous tornadoes and Hurricane Andrew, they literally blew the covers off of previously hidden construction flaws and corner-cutting in a lot of structures.

Once a house, office, factory or school is built, there’s no way to know its internal mechanical composition short of doing what tornadoes do—tear off the roof and walls. Buyers of used houses and buildings either have to take somebody’s word for it, or live with the uncertainty. Then this happens:

Photo by Roger Edwards (Spencer SD, 1998)

…or this:

Photo courtesy Tim Marshall (Garland TX, 2015), used by permission

…or this:

Photo courtesy Carson Eads (Ellis County TX, 2015), used by permission

The top photo, scanned from a 1998 damage slide, shows a houses blown off-slab…yet still intact! Tim calls these “sliders“…and not the kind you buy in a bag of six at White Castle either. The house simply sat on the foundation and wasn’t attached at all. Absolutely inexcusable!

The middle photo from Garland shows a cheap-ass, rusty cut nail being used to “attach” a bottom plate to the foundation. That is illegal in many areas. Why? Easy: Do you see the bottom plate? It went airborne with the walls of the house because it offered no resistance to the winds’ upward force on the structure, slipping the wood right past the nail. Lazy and negligent!

That bottom photo shows a wall in Ellis County (top picture) that wasn’t even attached to the rest of the school in any way. It simply fell over in weak-tornado winds. I probably could have pulled it down with a pickup truck and a tow chain. It was only a five-year-old school building too. No building code known dictates that exterior walls be held up with gravity alone. Pathetic! Fortunately this tornado happened at night and on a weekend, with nobody inside. Does your community’s kids’ safety matter enough to demand better of a school builder?

Does your own personal safety, and that of your future home’s other occupants, matter enough to demand better of your builder? Buyers of homes yet to be built, by in large, just don’t care to ask about wind reinforcements like straps and anchor bolts with nuts and washers. [This comes from my builder.] It’s all about decorative artifices like fashionable counter tops and the latest styles of tiles. Same goes for most commercial builders and local governments, including school boards. Tornadoes? Happens to others, not “me”.

For the cost saved in ordering “ordinary” counter tops, carpet or tiles, those reinforcements can be built in. In 2001-2 I had a fixed home-construction budget and sacrificed more “prestigious” carpet, tiles, counters and other ornamentals for three things:
* Dozens of anchor bolts at slab pour (with nuts/washers to go on later);
* Metal straps for wall connections to floor and roof, with larger straps and tighter intervals over the garage;
* Multiple metal lightning-protection points for the rooftop and grounding cables for them.

Experience surveying damage (and gathering bits of advice from Tim Marshall, a longtime friend, over prior years) helped a lot. Roll forward to 12 Jun 2009: an EF1-rated tornado passed right over my house, busting trees on all four sides. The house? Unscathed.

Violent (EF4-5) path segments that comprise the rarefied, low (less than 1%) upper echelon of tornado damage areas get the most attention because they contain news-friendly, war-zone-level destruction. Yet the overwhelming majority of all tornado-path areas combined (including the bulk of damage in “violent”tornadoes) is EF0–EF1, a level of wind that is so easy to defend against during construction. However, even EF3 winds can be mitigated by a simple measures, rendering fixable and superficial the damage that otherwise would have totaled it out.

Government regulations are not sufficient. This applies regardless of their apparent rigor. They are neither reliably followed nor enforced. Until both happen, adding more regulations to an already toothless set would be akin to spraying more gold paint on a smelly turd, and about as effective.

For starters, local governments need to do slab, frame and finishing inspections on all homes–not just spec homes, and not just superficial eye visits to save time. Inspection agencies need to make reasonable inspection quotas that don’t invite the temptation for inspectors to hurry, cut corners or look only at spec homes. And governments themselves, such as school boards, need to insist on wind safety, even if a shiny floor or attractive paneling has to be traded off to get that.

Voters need to hold their local elected officials accountable for code development and enforcement. It’s not a sexy issue, and most voters today with their ten-second attention spans and overall low civics educations are about as well-informed as a fence post, so I hold out low hope of this actually happening. Still, even a noisy few hinges can get some attention.

Buyers need to demand wind resistance, individually and en masse, and if need be, sacrifice vanity for safety! If you chose those high-dollar cabinets and counters over hurricane straps and anchor bolts, you have no cause to whine about the damage. Unfortunately the insurance company still may pay…but the hassle of demolishing and rebuilding should mean something. Insurers need to demand wind resistance and documentation of (and offer discounts for) it for their own bottom line as well as the safety of occupants. Simple free-market steps like these can lead to great progress in this area regardless of the level of regulations and building-code enforcement.

How to do it right? For starters:

Photo courtesy Tim Marshall, used by permission

Note the screwed tie and anchor bolt with nut and washer. Repeat all the way around…then do similar for wall-to-roof in terms of ties. There’s more to it, but not much more.

Builders need to proactively offer safety enhancements to customers, including commercial and educational ones, and be up-front and honest about the extra amount it costs. Customers need to be willing to spend that amount, or else sacrifice elsewhere. Marketing-savvy builders who readily construct homes this way (and who offer to contract-install shelters and safe rooms for only minimal markup as a selling point) can advertise their wind-resistance and safety as a competitive advantage. It’s not mandatory, but at least it’s offered and advertised. That will drive up awareness and demand, which will in turn drive up supply, and so on. It has to start sometime somewhere; why not now and here?

Prevention and Foresight: Rare Ideals

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I recently woke up to find that my PC, on which I had kept open some folders and projects mid-work, was rebooted yet again because of automatic “security” updates. Of course, formerly open windows never came back, and I had to go through the effort to reopen and re-order the array of software and “My Computer” type windows needed for the project. Fortunately, I have the foresight to save work often, in contingency of either this or sudden power outages, so that lost hours of productivity isn’t a problem when such things happen. Instead it becomes merely lost minutes. Still, that is wasteful and inefficient in principle; and even the relatively small act of having to manually save work shouldn’t be necessary. In other words…

Such things need not happen.

Why?

First of all, this is 2011, not 1986. Some programs do auto-save work or open displays at regular intervals, sometimes (what a concept!) as often as specified by the user. All should. [The software I use for this BLOG does!] Those that don’t (attention, Photoshop): learn from those that do, and make it happen. That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Second of all, this is 2011, not 1986. How about building an OS smart enough to recognize and synergistically communicate with open programs, such that they “know” a planned system shutdown is coming and save open documents on their own, and also, to recognize and save to the profile any open windows, then re-open them all right back up to where they were, upon reboot? Duh…it makes too much sense. That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Third of all, this is 2011, not 1986. Why the need to reboot at all? By now, I would have imagined that OS developers and hardware makers together would have figured out a way to install improvements without having to reboot. After all, PCs have existed for over three decades; surely that fundamental early flaw in the model can be improved upon sometime in that interval! That would be an “upgrade” I would support.

Finally, this principle is timeless: How about getting it right to begin with so that updates aren’t necessary? Whether the whole OS or any given program, or tangible flaws such as the upper driveway and walkway at the National Weather Center (a stretch of pavement that has undergone at least four reconstructions of various sorts since 2006), the ideal is the same. Think ahead. Do it right the first time. If the upgrade or reconstruction is that important, how about making it part of version 1?

Indeed it is a matter of principle. My TV and cable box need not download constant “updates” to keep them from being taken over by bad guys. I don’t have to call my furniture store to “upgrade” my mattress and bed frame, lest they collapse to the floor. I have a high-resolution slide and photo scanner from 2004 that hasn’t needed a single “upgrade” to do its thing with excellence; it still performs more and better (especially with film scanning) than newer models, based on online ratings.

I don’t have to bring in my vehicle (itself a complex machine) to the dealership every few weeks to get its software or hardware “patched”, lest the rotors break, the head gasket dissolves, or the intake manifold otherwise springs a leak. Do you like it when recalls happen and you have to take your car in for repairs because of faulty design? No. It’s the same principle.

Sure, occasional operator-driven maintenance is appropriate and responsible. The regular change of oil and other fluids is a good thing to remove built-up contaminants, if that’s the parallel; but it isn’t a valid analog in any way, shape or form. Software doesn’t accumulate grime. It’s either grimy and deficient to begin with, or not. The only two reasons it needs updating are if some new functions are added (a good thing, but why not have the foresight to put most of them in at the start?), or it weren’t coded robustly and securely from the very beginning.

Foresight, foresight, foresight…apparently it’s too much to ask developers to plan. Prevention, by definition, would prevent a lot of problems, from relatively small, nuisance-grade troubles such as these, to local road rebuilding, to severe weather killing people at festivals and stadiums, to gang violence in a community, to the national debt, to terrorist attacks and most wars; but alas, too many people in positions of influence at all levels seem utterly bereft of the concept of the benefits of thinking ahead.

Here’s another little example of many (just a convenient example, not picking specifically on Adobe)…


I appreciate that the developers and maintainers are willing to supply such updates for free, instead of charging for them. But such things strike me as reactive, not proactive.

Build it right the first time, and this wouldn’t be necessary, especially so stinking often:


God gave us the cognitive ability to plan and prevent; and while we’re not omniscient, the capability of foresight should be magnified and reinforced when multiplied by the number of members of a development team or group of any sort. Two heads are better than one, or at least, should be as long as laziness, passivity, fear of conflict, and mindless groupthink don’t take root. Clearly we’re not using our think-ahead capability to its fullest.

How about being proactive and not reactive? Wow, what a concept! Again, too many in government and the private sector don’t seem to understand this, regarding a gigantic variety of issues. The continual “need” for software upgrades is but one small symptom of a broader, more pervasive, indeed systematic deficiency of preventative thought in all realms.