Canadian P&C industry may have role to play in discussion of building codes: ICLR

An on-the-ground inspection of damage done to homes following several tornadoes that hit Ontario on Aug. 20, 2009 has started a discussion about whether or not the Canadian property and casualty insurance has a role to play in raising awareness about Canadian building codes and the municipal enforcement of these codes.
“We talked about the role that the ICLR [Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction], on behalf of the industry, might play in this sort of issue,” Paul Kovacs, executive director of ICLR, told people attending a presentation about the Aug. 20 tornado damage in Ontario. “Perhaps the role we can play more actively is to talk about the building code and in enforcing the building code.”
Kovacs made his remarks after hearing Gregory Kopp, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario, make a presentation on his findings regarding the tornado damage he inspected first-hand in Vaughn, Ontario.
The presentation was organized by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) and hosted in Swiss Re’s Toronto office.
It is now presumed that two F2 tornadoes, packing wind speeds of between 180 and 240 km-h, hit the Vaughn area on Aug. 20, 2009.
Kopp said some media reports zeroed in on whether the materials used to construct the houses in Vaughn were strong enough, but that focus is misplaced. He said the real focus should be on how the roofs are connected to the wall structures, since some of the tornado damage in Vaughn would not have happened had the roofs stayed attached to the houses.
In many instances, nails connecting a roof to the rest of the house were missing their mark, Kopp said.
Once a roof detaches from the rest of the home — a typical result of the massive upward lift of wind in a tornado event — the walls of the home collapse, causing much of the damage and safety issues associated with a tornado event, Kopp said.
In other instances in Vaughn, debris from a detached roof — wood, shingles, etc. — punctured windows of nearby houses, causing those homes to pressurize, creating an even stronger upward load of wind on the roof of those structures.
Keeping the roof on a house could be as simple as using hurricane braces, a relatively inexpensive fix, to make sure the roofs of newly built homes can withstand high wind speeds, Kopp said.
He noted the damage in Vaughn occurred to houses that were built to code, as well as to houses built 30-40 years ago (when the building code standards may have been different) and to houses that clearly weren’t built to current code.     
Kovacs said the ICLR was talking about taking two possible directions.
The first involved sharing research about tornado damage to help improve municipal building codes.
“Our industry has been relatively not involved in talking about codes for some time now,” he said. “How could we get more involved in sharing research from our industry’s perspective with those who make decisions about the building code?”
Secondly, Kovacs observed, Canada may consider following the lead of its counterparts in the U.S. property and casualty industry.
In the United States, he said, the property and casualty industry was starting to rate communities on how well their building codes were enforced.
“Community by community, there is a rating from our industry [in the United States],” Kovacs said. “Here is a community that really enforces the building code, and here’s how we’re confident that anybody who builds a new home in St. Louis [for example] is doing a really good job of getting checked by the community, because we evaluate [how the communities] enforce building codes in the United States.”
Kovacs said the ICLR is discussing whether such a program might be imported into Canada, how much would it cost, and whether it is something in which it is worth investing.