![]() "It was supposed to be a fortress like this," King said, staring in disbelief. That house, too, he said, had been built with hurricanes in mind. A fourth house, standing but with much of the roof and some walls caved in, was being searched by a rescue team two renters were unaccounted for, according to King. Three homes across the street were leveled down to concrete slabs. "We can clean this up in a month," he said. Even their in-home elevator appeared untouched. Up climbed King, awed by the fact that the structure had otherwise suffered only a little water damage and one cracked shower window. Now there was just a gaping hole and part of a handrail, leaving the five- bedroom, five-bathroom house accessible only by ladder. But that was by design: The family's architect used breakaway walls that would tear free without ripping off any more of the structure. The siding that had wrapped around a stairway providing access to the elevated house was gone, and so were the stairs. Saturday and drove his dark blue Ford F-150 pickup south for more than seven hours - far longer than the trip would ordinarily take, because of closed roads and recovery-crew gridlock - to reach his property at the end of 36th Street. Though the family had the relief of knowing their house, which they rent out when they are not using it themselves for vacations, had remained standing, King needed to see for himself what damage the hurricane had done. So people who live on the coast have to be ready for it." "We didn't used to have storms like this. "I believe the planet's getting warmer and the storms are getting stronger," said King, 68, an attorney. "We're thinking that we need to build a house that would survive for generations," Lackey said. Rick Scott told reporters, as public officials were called upon once again to examine the state's building standards. ![]() "Every time something like this happens, you have to say to yourself, 'Is there something we can do better?'" Gov. An estimate published in Forbes in 2012 said implementing an array of storm-resistance measures, including some of those advised by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, would add more than $30,000 to the cost of a typical house. Other experts had different views of the expense required. Gaskin, said that building a house the way they did roughly doubles the cost per square foot, compared with ordinary building practices. King would not say how much he and Lackey spent to fortify the beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000. Many of the residences and businesses rubbed out by Michael in Mexico Beach were far older rebuilding them to conform to the new code will be expensive and could price out some of the working-class people who historically have flocked to Mexico Beach. In the coastal Panhandle counties affected by Michael, the requirement is lower, 120 to 150 mph, and the rules for certain kinds of reinforcement have applied to houses built more than a mile from shore only since 2007. The story of how the Sand Palace made it through Michael while most of its neighbors collapsed is one about building in hurricane-prone Florida, and how construction regulations failed to imagine the Category 4 monster's catastrophic destruction.Īfter Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 beast, ravaged Miami-Dade County in 1992, new construction in the southern portion of the state was required to withstand 175 mph winds. "We just never knew we'd find the big one so fast." "We wanted to build it for the big one," he said. When The New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least three-quarters of the buildings were damaged, Lackey saw his Sand Palace still standing, majestic amid the apocalyptic wreckage, the last surviving beachfront house on his block. "I kept expecting to see it tear off."īut it did not. "It would buck like an airplane wing," he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tennessee. The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of gray fury worsening by the hour as Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof. Its video footage became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore earlier this month, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle. They also installed an outdoor security camera.
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