Tag: IBHS

Choosing Resiliency: Lessons from Hurricane Michael

In this post, Doug Allen, P.E., a structural engineer with Simpson Strong-Tie, looks at the choice homeowners in disaster-prone areas face between simply building to code and building to standards of resilience or IBHS FORTIFIED Home™ standards instead.

Resilience, or resiliency: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

In the wake of the most recent and very devastating hurricane seasons, the theme of structural resiliency has resurfaced with renewed urgency for increasing numbers of homeowners, builders, Designers and civic planners. Hurricanes pose a triple threat of high winds, substantial rain and storm surge. Extreme weather has cost the nation nearly $100 billion in damage during 2018. Accordingly, awareness has risen within affected and surrounding coastal regions regarding their communities’ existing structural resilience ratings (low or high) and the need to improve in view of the losses as well as the time and cost to rebuild what was destroyed.
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Keep Your Roof On

He huffed, and he puffed, and he blew the roof sheathing off! That’s not the way kids’ tale goes, but the dangers high winds pose to roof sheathing are very real. Once the roof sheathing is gone, the structure is open and its contents are exposed to the elements and much more vulnerable to wind or water damage. It is a storyline that we meet all too often in the news.

About two years ago, the ASTM subcommittee on Driven and Other Fasteners (F16.05), addressed fastening for roof sheathing in high-wind areas by adding a special nail to ASTM F1667-17 – Standard Specification for Driven Fasteners: Nails, Spikes and Staples. The Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nail was added to the standard as Table 46. Figure 1 illustrates the nail and lists its geometrical specifications. This is a family of five ring-shank nails that can be made from carbon steel or stainless steel (300 series). Specific features of these nails are the ring pitch (number of rings per inch), the ring diameter over the shank, the length of deformed shank and the head diameter. Also, note B specifies that the nails shall comply with the supplementary requirement of Table S1.1, which tabulates bending yield strength. In this diameter class, the minimum bending yield strength allowed is 100 ksi.

Figure 1. Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nails (ASTM. 2017. Standard Specification for Driven Fasteners: Nails, Spikes and Staples, F1667-17. ASTM International, West Conshohocken, PA.)

The IBHS (Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety) discusses roof deck fastening in its Builders Guide that describes the “FORTIFIED for Safer Living” structures. The IBHS FORTIFIED program offers solutions that reduce building vulnerability to severe thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes. Keeping the roof sheathing on the structure is critical to maintaining a safe enclosure and minimizing damage, and roof sheathing ring-shank nails can be part of the solution. As Figure 2 from IBHS (2008) shows, every wood-frame structure has wind vulnerability.

Figure 2. Hurricane, high wind and tornado regions of the US (IBHS. 2008. Builders Guide, Fortified for Safer Living. Tampa, FL. 81 pp.)

More importantly for the wood-frame engineering community, the Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nails are being included in the next revision of the AWC National Design Specification for Wood Construction (NDS-2018), which is a reference document to both the International Building Code and the International Residential Code. You will be able to use the same NDS-2018, chapter 12 withdrawal equation to calculate the withdrawal resistance for Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nails and Post Frame Ring-Shank nails. The calculated withdrawal will be based on the length of deformed shank embedded in the framing member. Also, Designers need to consider the risk of nail head pull-through when fastening roof sheathing with ring-shank nails. If the pull-through for roof sheathing ring-shank nails is not published, you will be able to use the new pull-through equation in the NDS-2018 to estimate that resistance.
Simpson Strong-Tie has some stainless-steel products that meet the requirements for Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nails. These will be especially important to those in coastal high-wind areas. Table 1 shows some of the Simpson Strong-Tie nails that can be used as roof sheathing ring-shank nails. These nails meet the geometry and bending yield strength requirements given in ASTM F1667. See the Fastening Systems catalog C-F-2017 for nails in Type 316 stainless steel that also comply with the standard.

Table 1. Simpson Strong-Tie collated nails made from Type 304 stainless steel that comply with F1667-17 specifications for Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank Nails.

Improve your disaster resilience and withstand extreme winds by fastening the sheathing with roof sheathing ring-shank nails. You can find Roof Sheathing Ring-Shank nails in ASTM F1667, Table 46, and you will see them in the AWC NDS-2018, which will be available at the end of the year. Let us know your preferred fastening practices for roof sheathing.