Your question gets to the heart of why it’s not important to add another category. Once you get a truly monster storm, a lot more factors come into play as to how dangerous it is than just wind speed. There’s not a single band aid solution.
North east coast of Australia gets hit with category 5 cyclones every 5 to 10 years or so, there are plenty of buildings that survive that.
Parents copped the brunt of Cyclone Yasi with 180 mph gusts, only damage to their house was they lost a section of guttering, it was peeled off never to be seen again.
Building standards there are rigorous. They built their house themselves (in a rural area, 180 acre farms), its engineering design was required to withstand wind loadings of at least 70m/s (160mph) .
It is a steel-framed, single story kit home, on a steel piling foundation about 3 feet off the ground. The local building inspector also told them to put long threaded rods from the roofing trusses to the subfloor and the foundations while building it and tension them up, they eventually put in 36. This effectively ties the roof to the foundation and stops it peeling off, once your roof comes off the rest of the house usually folds up like an open cardboard box.
Apart from losing the section of guttering, there was no other damage to the house. They boarded up the larger glass sliding doors and were somewhat alarmed at the amount of flex on the glass as the cyclone passed, but they held up ok. They didn’t get power back for two weeks , which was the worst of it for them as it’s very humid afterwards, they had a generator and ran it in the evening to power the aircon in their bedroom each night until it ran out of fuel.
Possibly? Our building techniques have improved since the scale was originally finalized so it may make sense to have a category for our truly hardened structures.
Your question gets to the heart of why it’s not important to add another category. Once you get a truly monster storm, a lot more factors come into play as to how dangerous it is than just wind speed. There’s not a single band aid solution.
It’s why they stopped at 5. Everything was gone anyway when it hits. In a category six it’s even more gone so it didn’t make them much sense.
North east coast of Australia gets hit with category 5 cyclones every 5 to 10 years or so, there are plenty of buildings that survive that.
Parents copped the brunt of Cyclone Yasi with 180 mph gusts, only damage to their house was they lost a section of guttering, it was peeled off never to be seen again.
Building standards there are rigorous. They built their house themselves (in a rural area, 180 acre farms), its engineering design was required to withstand wind loadings of at least 70m/s (160mph) .
It is a steel-framed, single story kit home, on a steel piling foundation about 3 feet off the ground. The local building inspector also told them to put long threaded rods from the roofing trusses to the subfloor and the foundations while building it and tension them up, they eventually put in 36. This effectively ties the roof to the foundation and stops it peeling off, once your roof comes off the rest of the house usually folds up like an open cardboard box.
Apart from losing the section of guttering, there was no other damage to the house. They boarded up the larger glass sliding doors and were somewhat alarmed at the amount of flex on the glass as the cyclone passed, but they held up ok. They didn’t get power back for two weeks , which was the worst of it for them as it’s very humid afterwards, they had a generator and ran it in the evening to power the aircon in their bedroom each night until it ran out of fuel.
Possibly? Our building techniques have improved since the scale was originally finalized so it may make sense to have a category for our truly hardened structures.