To heck with concrete tile, get a concrete house!! To tell the truth, I'm a little surprised that the insurance companies and FEMA haven't gone into the hurricane damaged areas and demanded that happen.
I lived in Guam for ~7 years, and that's all that you can build over there anymore. That's because the insurance companies, banks & FEMA got tired of replacing wooden structures that just wouldn't hold up to the typhoons (western pacific hurricanes). Add to that the laminated glass windows that are now available, and you have a house that's pretty much impervious to damaging winds.
For instance, back in '97, a class 5 typhoon (by the name of Paka) went past Guam's northern tip. Sustained winds at Anderson Air Force Base (which pretty much takes up the better part of the northern tip of the island) and the villages in that area had sustained winds of 180+mph, with gusts over 200mph (one gust measured over 225mph!!). And like a hurricane, these were winds that lasted for hours, not minutes.
At the end of it all, there were NO buildings on Guam that were destroyed by the damaging winds. There were a handful that had just recently been completed that had some roof damage (and that was more due to the fact that the contractor that built them used 4" thick slabs for construction, versus the more popular 6" slabs), mostly just the roofs peeling back on the houses. Most importantly, there was zero loss of life due to the storm.
I recall hearing one guy talking on the radio after the storm that during the storm, he was watching his neighbor's house, because that neighbor still had a wood & shingle roof (there's still some old ones out there, but insuring them is hella difficult, and they're really pushing those people to replace with concrete roofs). This guy said that he watched the neighbor's roof as the corner was being picked up by the winds, then slammed back down, picked up & slammed down, over and over again. He said he watched it as the wood finally gave way & broke, and the piece flew off his neighbor's roof, straight toward his own house! He continued watching, in awe, as this piece (he described it as plywood ~5' square in area, with 2x4's still attached, as well as roofing tin, which they use over there in leiu of shingles) flew toward his house, landed in his back yard, then slid across the lawn right toward the sliding glass door where he was standing, and slammed into it!! :shocked:
Luckily, he said, he had replaced that sliding glass door a few years before (when the old one with just regular glass in it), had been damaged during a typhoon. What he had there now was a door with laminated glass (two pieces of pane glass, laminated to a slab of plastic in between.......sorta like your car's windshield) in it. He said he jumped back (instinct) when it hit the door, and was amazed when he looked back, and saw that while the outer piece of glass had cracked, the door was still intact, and holding back the wind and rain, and continued to do so for the remainder of the storm!
And that's why, living in tornado alley, I say that if I ever build a house, it'll be reinforced concrete with laminated glass windows.
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