Edited by Ted
Cushman
Contents:
Hurricane Charley's First
Lessons
Stray Voltage Zaps Homeowners
Amid Apprehension, Code Comes to
Pennsylvania
NAFTA Panel Slams U.S. on Tariffs
Offcuts
The Category Four winds of Hurricane Charley had barely died
away in late August when experts began to assess the storm's
damage and learn from the experience. Even as utility workers
rushed to restore power, and National Guard, FEMA, and Red
Cross relief workers arrived to provide security, cash
assistance, critical supplies, and medical care to hard-hit
communities, engineers and code officials began to tally the
damage to homes and commercial structures — and seek
explanations for why some buildings survived and others did
not.
One
quick conclusion was inescapable: The tougher codes adopted in
Florida after the disastrous losses of 1992's Hurricane Andrew
proved their worth against Charley's onslaught. Whether
stick-built or manufactured to HUD-code standards, homes built
to new upgraded codes outperformed older buildings by far.
"There are no Country Walks in Hurricane Charley's wake, no
whole subdivisions blown away because of flimsy materials and
shoddy workmanship," began an August 26 Miami Herald
report.
"Just take a look at us," Port Charlotte resident David
Bartlett told the Herald. Bartlett's brand-new home came
through the storm without significant damage, while a
neighbor's older house was totaled.
Newer "mobile homes" perform
well. Early press reports highlighted the fact that
trailer homes in Charley's track were devastated by the storm's
unexpectedly high winds at landfall. Statistics bore out first
impressions: The Orlando Sentinel reports that the
storm destroyed just 1 of every 107 site-built homes it struck,
but ruined 1 of every 14 mobile homes in its path.
Structures built under Florida's new
high-wind codes (left) fared much better than older buildings
(right).
But informed sources were quick to point out that most of the
devastated trailer homes were older models built before codes
were upgraded. Dennis Schrader, president of the Florida
Manufactured Housing Association, wrote in the Tampa
Tribune, "Homes built and installed to the new standards
fared very well, stayed secure, and suffered only cosmetic
damage on sites just a few feet from less fortunate older
homes."
The lighter-duty garage door above
succumbed to wind pressure, while the reinforced door at right
held firm, despite taking a hit from flying
debris.
Emergency response gets high
marks. Institutions tasked with storm response also
showed that they have learned from the Andrew experience. In
contrast to the week-long delay before federal disaster relief
started in 1992, President Bush declared storm-hammered
sections of Florida a disaster the day the storm hit, and
relief money started to flow almost instantly.
The federal effort was not immune to bureaucratic oddities,
however. A 74-year-old Punta Gorda man whose trailer was
shredded in the storm told the Palm Beach Post he
"fell to the floor and cried" when he opened an envelope from
FEMA to find a check for $1.69. "It's an insult," he told the
Post: "I would rather have gotten nothing." Officials
told the paper that the man was not qualified to receive more
because his losses were covered by insurance, and that the
token amount was intended to buy gas for his generator.
"Evidently you don't live in Florida," the man said he told a
FEMA representative, "because gas here is $1.83."
But for the insurance industry and those who have coverage, the
Charley experience looks to be a big improvement over Andrew.
Tom Gallagher, who was the state's insurance commissioner when
Andrew hit, is now Florida's chief financial officer. Gallagher
says higher premiums, tighter regulations, and higher
deductibles have left insurance companies in a much stronger
position than they were after Andrew, and able to pay claims
promptly. Thousands of adjusters flocked to the state in the
first week after the storm, and many homeowners have already
received checks.
Tight supplies. But as the
real work of rebuilding begins, Floridians may find it harder
to get building materials and contractors on site to do the
work than it is to get the insurance money to pay for repairs.
Florida's hot building market was already facing labor
shortages and high-priced materials, and the added pressure of
storm-repair needs will make the market even tighter. Florida
builders are asking the state to temporarily loosen licensing
restrictions, allowing out-of-state contractors and trade
workers an easier hurdle if they travel to Florida to tackle a
share of the work.
More to come. The Tampa-based
Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), an insurance
industry group that focuses on building code issues, is
coordinating efforts by teams of engineers to identify causes
and remedies for damage sustained in Charley's winds.
Preliminary conclusions will be released at an IBHS meeting in
early November. But in the meantime, as this issue of JLC goes
to press, Hurricane Frances has drenched Florida with heavy
rains, while Hurricane Ivan is bearing down on the Gulf Coast.
By the time readers receive this magazine, coastal homeowners
and contractors may already be learning the lessons of another
hurricane the hard way — from the destructive force of
flood, high seas, and 130-plus-mph winds.
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Stray Voltage Zaps
Homeowners
A dip in the backyard pool can be invigorating on a hot day.
But Fayetteville, N.C., homeowners Lonn and Debra Rickstrom
have been finding it a bit too invigorating. Their pool has
been zapping them with 2- to 5-volt shots of "stray voltage"
— excess current from power company transformers that is
following a ground path back to its source, instead of the
neutral conductor wire. In this case, the path of least
resistance included the Rickstroms' pool, the Rickstroms
themselves, and even their family dog. "Our Labrador retriever
won't go into the pool anymore," Debra Rickstrom told
JLC. "She loves the water, but she's afraid of it now.
She just looks at it and cries."
Stray voltage is rare in residential situations. It's more
likely to be a concern on farms, where it can affect milk
production and cause other problems with livestock. Because of
the farm connection, the problem has been extensively studied
and is relatively well understood. Sometimes the imbalance of
electrical potential that causes the low-voltage leaks is
traceable to defects in house or barn wiring, but in other
cases it stems from characteristics of the utility power supply
system.
Utilities distribute electric current to local substations over
high-voltage (7,200 or 14,400 volt) transmission lines. At the
substation, transformers step the voltage down to 600 volts for
local distribution. Transformers near homes step the power down
again to 120 volts, for use in houses. Transformers work with
coil windings that induce current with an electrical field
— in a transformer, there is no direct connection between
the "hot" high-voltage lines and the lower-voltage "hot" lines
carrying the stepped-down current away.
But the neutral conductors in the system are a different story.
In the U.S. electrical supply system, primary neutral
conductors aren't always sized to carry all the current the
system supplies, and they aren't typically insulated to
separate them from the ground. The utilities ground their
primary neutral lines to the earth at close intervals, and let
the earth (along with water and sewer pipes or any other buried
metal objects) carry up to half of the return current back to
the substation or to the generating plant. The greater the
power demand on the system, the more current flows through this
informal underground system. These widely diffused "earth
currents" are usually too weak to detect, but sometimes they
exceed the 2- to 4-volt threshold and become noticeable to
humans.
The plot gets thicker: The neutral conductors of local
transmission lines are grounded together with the neutral lines
of residential electric service. So as current in the utility
neutral seeks a path home, it may choose to travel into a
residential wiring system, as well as the home's plumbing
supply and drains, its residential lightning protection system,
or any other system or object in the home that is connected to
the main ground. That's what the Rickstroms think has happened
to their pool, their gas meter, and the rest of their home's
grounded electrical system: They've all become part of the
utility company's return current path.
After going back and forth with utility company representatives
for months, Rickstrom says, he finally decided just to
disconnect his pool's ground from the home's grounding system.
"Even with all the power turned off to the pool equipment
— just the ground connected — we still got shocks,"
he says. "As soon as we unhooked the ground, it stopped."
Rickstrom's pool now has its own separate ground, not bonded to
the house grounding system. "It's not code-compliant," he says,
"but it fixed the problem." Rickstrom says his local utility
has admitted that they caused the stray current his family
noticed, but he says they insist that the condition is within
permissible limits and they won't take any further action to
fix it.
Homeowner Lonn Rickstrom measures 2 to 4
volts to ground at poolside (left) and at his gas meter
(right). Wet skin allows current to flow through people,
causing a tingling sensation, at voltages below this
threshold.
In other cases, utilities have responded more proactively. When
stray current caused shocks to homeowners and patrons of
community pools in New Jersey, utilities called in consultants
and upgraded their neutral conductors to handle more current.
But critics say that's not enough: Wilmington, Del., electrical
engineer Donald Zipse, for instance, argues that the problem
calls for a revamping of the whole electrical grid. The
grounded neutrals of the present system should be isolated from
earth by insulators, says Zipse, and a separate equipment
ground path should be provided for safety purposes. That four-
or five-wire system, with an isolated neutral and a separate
ground, is the standard in Europe and Latin America. (Zipse's
article and other background material on stray voltage are
posted at www.mikeholt.com, the website of
electrician and educator Mike Holt.)
In agriculture, stray voltage remains a big-money problem. This
past June, a jury awarded an Idaho dairy farm $17 million in
damages in a suit against their utility company. And with power
demand rising and electrical distribution systems aging,
experts say that residential stray voltage is a problem that
will probably get worse before it gets better.
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Amid Apprehension, Code Comes
to Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania adopted its first-ever statewide building code
in July, as the legislature approved state enforcement of the
Uniform Construction Code, a slightly modified version
of the
International Building Code (
IBC) and
International Residential Code (
IRC).
Authored by committees of the International Code Council and
approved by a vote of its membership (voting members must be
municipal or state building officials), the IRC and
IBC are intended to be simpler, better organized, and
more flexible than the earlier regional model building codes
that they are superseding nationwide. But Pennsylvanians in
rural areas, unused to any building code at all, have viewed
the incoming code as anything but simple. As the effective date
approached, local papers chronicled an energetic political food
fight at the county and town level.
Building code? What's that?
The state law authorizing the code required local governments
to choose one of three enforcement methods: appoint qualified
local building officials, hire an outside contractor to conduct
plan reviews and inspections, or let the state do it. But
citizens weren't ready to discuss those choices until after
they worked through their resistance to the whole idea of a
building code.
"Some people are in full panic mode," Mark Fortney, director of
research for the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, told the
Greensburg, Pa., Tribune-Review in April. Particular
targets of ire were provisions covering remodeling and
maintenance of existing buildings: Describing the stricter
requirements as "fascism" in a reader-feedback post at a
newspaper website, one police officer expressed fears that he
would have to patrol neighborhoods looking for missing window
screens.
Rhetoric from state legislators and local officials was more
moderate, but still reflected strong constituent feelings:
"Some of the things they want inspected are just ridiculous,"
one local inspector told the Tribune-Review. A state
representative said, "This is government going too far."
A last-minute vote in the legislature took many remodeling and
repair projects out of the code's scope, alleviating much of
the concern. But change still won't be easy. Before the new
law, Pennsylvania was one of only six states without some
building code in force statewide, and 60% of municipalities had
no real code at all. JLC contributing editor and
long-time Pennsylvania contractor Carl Hagstrom says, "I've
needed two things from the town before this: a septic plan
approval, and an electrical rough-in inspection so the power
company would heat up the service panel. That's it." For
contractors outside the big cities and suburbs, he predicts,
the adjustment to a full-blown system of plan review and
inspections may be anything but smooth.
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NAFTA Panel Slams U.S. on
Tariffs
The bi-national panel set up under the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to rule on U.S. penalties on Canadian
softwood imports has issued a final opinion in the case. Losing
patience with continued insistence by the U.S. Commerce
Department's International Trade Commission (ITC) that Canadian
exports threaten the U.S. lumber industry, the panel chose not
to "remand" the issue to Commerce for another reconsideration,
but instead directed Commerce to change its decision and drop
the penalties.
By U.S. law, Commerce can only impose penalties if there is
injury, or at least the threat of injury, to U.S. producers.
With lumber prices near record peaks, and last year's timber
output from the American West at its highest level since 1992,
the claim of injury is harder to support than ever. Noting that
Commerce has failed to supply any new evidence or reasoning in
round after round of appeals hearings, the panel wrote, "this
Panel can reasonably conclude that there is no other record
evidence to support the Commission's affirmative threat
determination." Asking Commerce to go back yet again to
reconsider, said the panel, would be a waste of time.
The decision is seen by Canadians as a final victory in the
NAFTA process, but when, and even whether, the U.S. will
actually lift trade sanctions is still an open question —
and one that may throw the entire NAFTA free-trade arrangement
into doubt. The panel took disapproving note of the Commerce
Department's hard stance in its sharply worded ruling: "[The
International Trade Commission] has refused to follow the
instructions in the First Panel Remand Decision.... The
Commission has made it abundantly clear that it is simply
unwilling to accept this Panel's review authority.... This
conduct obviates the impartiality of the agency decision-making
process, and severely undermines the entire Chapter 19 panel
review process."
An American panel member, Mark R. Joelson, added a separate and
emphatic individual opinion to the unanimous ruling: "For the
Panel to postpone finality by issuing yet another open-ended
remand instruction to the Commission would be to allow the
Chapter 19 process to become a mockery and an exercise in
futility. This is not an acceptable approach."
On September 10th, the ITC agreed, under protest, to comply
with the NAFTA directive. But trade officials have found ways
in recent months to frustrate the intent of similar trade
rulings, whether issued by NAFTA panels or by panels of the
World Trade Organization (WTO). WTO panels hear appeals brought
under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a
wider trade agreement among most of the world's nations that
the U.S. has also signed and ratified, along with NAFTA.
In early August, a WTO panel ruled that a group of nations
including Canada, the European Union countries, and Japan can
impose punitive tariffs on the U.S. in response to the U.S.
"Byrd Amendment" law. After the WTO decision was announced,
Commerce released a statement that it would continue to collect
the anti-dumping penalties, and did not say whether it would
continue to award the cash to U.S. companies or not.
The Byrd Amendment calls for anti-dumping penalties on imported
goods to be paid out to the U.S. companies supposedly hurt by
the dumping. In the Canadian case, that means duties paid by
Canadian lumber companies would be paid to U.S. companies,
giving the U.S. timber lobby a huge incentive to keep fighting
the case: If they can find a way to win by taking their case to
U.S. courts or to Congress, they stand to reap cash windfalls
in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
U.S. keeping the cash. The
Canadian side sees a bad sign in a Commerce decision in another
part of the complex case. After going back as ordered to
reconsider anti-dumping penalties assessed on Canadian producer
West Fraser Timber, the Commerce Department determined that
there was no evidence of dumping. But the duties paid to the
U.S. by West Fraser have not been returned, and the Toronto
Globe and Mail says Commerce officials have told U.S.
Congressmen friendly to the U.S. lumber companies that Commerce
has no legal obligation to give the money back. Canadian Trade
Minister Jim Petersen complained in a letter to U.S. Commerce
Secretary Donald Evans that holding onto the cash "contradicts
the basic provisions of U.S. trade law and seriously undermines
NAFTA."
With so much cash on the line, the Coalition for Fair Lumber
Imports, a lobbying group formed by some U.S. lumber companies,
is not ready to give up. Harry Clark, a lawyer representing the
U.S. side, told reporters, "Clearly they won, but it doesn't
change anything. The U.S. industry is going to do what it takes
to fight these subsidies."
For U.S.-based firms that have global spans, however, the issue
is much less clear. Weyerhaeuser, headquartered in Washington
State, logs extensively in Canada and has paid millions of
dollars of penalties bringing wood back across the border.
Weyerhaeuser's official position is that the two nations should
negotiate an end to the dispute. But after the August NAFTA
ruling, many Canadians reject the idea of negotiating the
issue. "What's there to negotiate if you win?" asked John
Allan, president of the British Columbia Lumber Trade
Council.
Canada has the support of U.S. builders and lumber
distributors, who have long been urging an end to the trade
penalties. The National Association of Home Builders applauded
the August NAFTA ruling, as it has similar decisions in recent
months and years. "We call on the administration to refrain
from any further legal maneuvers or delays and allow this
decision to be implemented within 10 days, as the NAFTA panel
ordered," Bobby Rayburn, president of the National Association
of Home Builders, said in a statement. "This would rescind the
27% levies on Canadian lumber and end the hidden tax imposed on
American home buyers and renters."
But with billions of dollars in cash on the table, neither
urging nor negotiating may bring an end to a process in which
the U.S. lumber lobby seems determined, if not to have the last
word, at least to make sure that there never is a last word. As
lumber-lobby lawyer Harry Clark put it, "This just isn't going
away."
Back to
TopOffcuts
A Duluth, Minn., construction worker uncovered an
unexploded Korean Warera mortar round while
working in the excavation for the city's new Entertainment
Convention Center, according to the Associated Press. Worker
Todd Hansen reportedly picked up the shell and began to clean
dirt out of it with a nail, before being advised by a foreman
to gently set the shell down and leave it alone. National
Guardsmen were called to safely detonate the 60mm round, in a
blast which could be felt for several blocks.
The United States saw a record-high 173 reported
tornadoes in the month of August, according to a
report from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration. With records going back to 1950, the agency
says the highest number of August tornado reports before this
year was just 126, set in August of 1979. This year's high
tornado count is caused in part by the many tropical storms to
hit the U.S. this August: Tornadoes often accompany hurricanes
and near-hurricane-strength tropical storms.
Most homes in the U.S. are underinsured,
according to a report in the New York Times. Insurers
have phased out "guaranteed replacement" policies that promised
to rebuild the house as it was, regardless of cost, with
"extended replacement" policies that typically fall short of
the actual cost of rebuilding by an average of about 25%, and
sometimes by as much as 60%. While it is possible to insure a
house for enough money to rebuild it, salespeople often use
lower numbers in order to keep policy premiums low.
The endangered species listing of Arizona's pygmy
owl will stay in effect until at least January,
reports the Arizona Daily Star. Homebuilders in and
around Tucson have been seeking to de-list the owl, which they
say is no different from pygmy owls thriving nearby in New
Mexico. But a federal judge said that the owl should stay
listed while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsiders its
case. Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service is also
considering Pima County's proposed Habitat Protection Plan for
regulating development around Tucson; if that plan is approved,
the owl's endangered status will no longer be a factor in
permits.
Police in Long Beach, Miss., say they nabbed a
construction-site thief in August when the man tried
to trade a stolen kitchen range for an automobile. According to
a report in the Biloxi Sun-Herald, the miscreant
didn't realize that the man he offered to swap with was the
father of a contractor on the site that had been robbed. A
company employee agreed to meet and discuss the swap at a
restaurant, and police followed the pair to the man's house and
arrested him when he showed the stove. Bail was set at
$10,000.
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