The Impact of Temporal and Spatial Variation in Building Codes on the Hurricane Wind Vulnerability of Residential Single Family Homes

Building codes evolve as engineers and scientists learn more about the destructive capability of natural phenomena and how to design structures to effectively withstand these extreme events. The 2012 building and residential codes published by the International Code Council have recently seen significant updates to the wind hazard and design criteria, and have generally decreased the design wind speeds along much of the hurricane-prone East and Gulf Coasts. Catastrophe models, which integrate a stochastic hazard with views of building vulnerability in order to provide reliable risk estimates, can be used to quantify the impact of spatial and temporal building vulnerability changes. This study quantifies the impact of the building code related changes in a catastrophe modeling framework using a sophisticated hurricane model and an actuarial metric: average annual loss. A resulting discussion is provided detailing the implications of this study.