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In recent years, South Florida has needed strict building codes and hazard-mitigation measures to discourage insurance companies from fleeing the region and to control skyrocketing homeowner rates and deductibles. Since Andrew, insurance rates have more than doubled in the region, and now residents of Key West, Miami, Miami Beach, and Ft. Lauderdale pay some of the highest homeowner premiums in the nation.

Property insurers, backed by reinsurance policies, funded most of the rebuilding after Andrew. Eleven Florida insurers collapsed, and numerous other companies were squeezed by rising reinsurance premiums. As insurers sought to reduce their financial exposure in coastal areas, the state had to create a last-resort insurance fund for residents who could not buy policies on the private market. Now the fund is Florida's second-largest insurer.

If another Andrew or a series of major hurricanes struck South Florida, there could be a collapse of insurance availability in the area. Businesses could be unable to purchase affordable property insurance, and could leave in droves. "If a period of intense storm activity like that of the 1940s returned, the impact could be catastrophic," said Tony Carper, director of Broward County Emergency Management Division.

Meanwhile, the economic vulnerability of South Florida continues to grow. For example, huge luxury condominium projects are being built in several beach communities in the region. Kate Hale, former director of Dade County Office of Emergency Management and now a consultant, summed up the region's dilemma: "There is little recognition that we are expanding the demographic and economic vulnerabilities at a rate that exceeds our capabilities to respond to and recover from hurricanes."

Driven by these nagging problems, South Florida has taken some important strides to reduce future storm damage. Broward County is a showcase for numerous federal, state, and local hazard-mitigation programs. In 1997, the city of Deerfield Beach became a pilot community for Project Impact, a program established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Through this initiative, communities build partnerships with local businesses and leaders to assess their vulnerabilities to and prepare for natural disasters. The city will receive about $1 million for retrofit projects, including $150,000 to install window shutters and hurricane straps on the auditorium and cafeteria of the local high school, which is also the city's emergency shelter. In addition, Broward County, to its credit, is the only county in Florida to build schools, which can double as shelters, to meet new state standards for storm resistance.

The state of Florida has started a $9 million program to help communities identify hazard-prone areas. Each city and county will receive funds to develop a Local Mitigation Strategy. The state encourages counties and municipalities to work together to assess local vulnerabilities such as areas prone to flood or storm surge. After a natural disaster, communities would have a list of mitigation initiatives, which would allow for rapid application of rebuilding funds.

Since Andrew, South Florida's most effective mitigation effort has been an overhaul of its construction standards. In 1994, the South Florida Building Code, which applies to Miami- Dade and Broward counties, was extensively revised, although each jurisdiction administers the code independently. In both counties, contractors must follow stricter construction guidelines and install certain products on homes and businesses.

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In Miami-Dade County, current rules include the following:

• Roofing sheets must be thicker—5/8-inch—instead of a half-inch required before Andrew, and they must be plywood. Particle board, which is banned, has a tendency to soak up moisture and collapse.
  
  
• Plywood sheets must be nailed down. Roofers cannot use staple guns.
  
  
• Roofers must use 45 nails instead of 33 to attach each 4-by 8-foot sheet of plywood to rafters.
  
  
• Wood gable ends must be properly cross-braced with 2-by-4s.
  
  
• Contractors must install high-quality shutters or super strong "impact" glass—like that found in car windshields—in each new single-family home to prevent wind-blown debris from breaking windows.
  
  
• Construction products are examined by independent laboratories under the guidance of the county compliance office.

Yet many builders and manufacturers aggressively opposed South Florida's code revisions. "Our industry spent tons of money and effort to fight the implementation of these standards," said Jeff Robinson, owner of Jeff Robinson Shutter Company, who has supported the 1994 code changes.

When Palm Beach County tried to pass a measure to require shutters or "impact-resistant" glass on new homes, builders again fought back hard. "There was tremendous industry opposition," said Bob Ghianda. So the county offered another option: property owners could buy precut and pre-drilled plywood to be stored. Plywood and structural attachments probably cost less than $500 for a small house. There is no way of knowing, however, whether homeowners will actually use this plywood to cover windows in case of a storm, said Kurt Eismann, county building director. Plywood is difficult to install on windows, especially when winds kick up as a storm approaches. So for protection during hurricanes, Palm Beach County's provisions for window protection are probably inferior, though they cost homeowners much less in the short-run, local officials said.

The regulatory cost to consumers, of course, is at the heart of the controversy over the South Florida code. "People are being shut out of the residential market," said William T. Stroop, chapter manager of the Associated General Contractors, South Florida Chapter. He argued that the code is full of "mandatory details" that allow little discretion to architects, engineers, and contractors. "Local code policies are typical of governmental over-reaching. This conflict represents a battle in all segments of society of how much government is the right amount."

Hurricane shutters and superwindows, for example, are expensive, driving up home price tags by thousands of dollars. To limit damages of major storms, contractors must use storm- resistant materials and technologies that can add 25–40% to the cost of a new home, builders said. Engineers, however, dispute those figures. Saffir, for example, estimates that the South Florida code has added 5–8% to the price of new homes.

Homebuilders and architects criticize local programs that oversee testing of building products, arguing that regulators are arbitrary and rigid. Miami-Dade's approval process is probably the toughest in the country for wind protection. (Broward County's rules are generally considered more flexible.) Architects and builders said they must often wait several months—sometimes up to a year-and-a-half—to receive approval for a product from the Miami-Dade compliance office, causing expensive delays in construction. "It can cost a manufacturer $60,000 to get approval for a product for use in one county, so it's impractical to have this kind of process on a county level," said Mark Wynnemer, an architect based in South Miami. "Manufacturers do not want to redesign their products to get approval in a single jurisdiction."

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Christopher Cooke-Yarborough, an architect also based in South Miami, said that county rules are encouraging scofflaws to build illegally. He compared Miami-Dade's "overly strict" policies to the establishment of a 35 mile-per-hour speed limit on an interstate highway. "Eventually," he said, "people will stop paying attention to that kind of law." Regulators acknowledged that there is an epidemic of illegal building in the county.

But shutter manufacturer Jeff Robinson argued that tougher standards have vastly improved the quality of construction materials used in South Florida. For example, before the code revisions came into effect in 1994, manufacturers did not have to test shutters. Adding shutters did not require a building permit, so their installation was rarely inspected. In a highly competitive market, manufacturers made inferior window-protection devices out of increasingly cheap materials, and local regulators turned a blind eye. "We could have made a shutter out of a rigid piece of cardboard and it could have gotten approval from building departments," Robinson said.

Consequently, thousands of shutters failed during Andrew. Small pieces of debris broke through shoddy materials, allowing wind to rush into buildings and wreak havoc. In other cases, high winds caused shutters to break or bend so far that windows were shattered. Many shutters were pulled off by suction pressures. "Shutters didn't work the way clients expected, and that was an embarrassment to me," Robinson said.

Now shutters must pass tough impact and wind-stress tests. Just as important, each shutter installation in Miami-Dade and Broward counties is checked by inspectors. Despite all these requirements, shutters in South Florida are less expensive today than before Andrew, primarily due to manufacturing innovations driven by strict government standards, Robinson said. Nevertheless, the building industry's "antipathy against (the code compliance office) is strong, and there has been a tremendous amount of political pressure to undo the South Florida code. Yet I don't hear any consumers asking for pullbacks in the code."

Actually at least one homeowner objects to tighter construction standards. In the Country Walk development, Ron and Carmen Berman owned a single-family residence and condominium, both destroyed by Andrew. Ron Berman, a local merchant, acknowledged that his house and condo were shoddily built before the storm. "The whole (development) was a code violation." Although part of the successful class-action lawsuit against the developer, he was infuriated by delays in rebuilding his townhouse. "The county went overboard after Andrew, making it uneconomical to build a home. County officials were primarily responsible for delays."

But Berman's next-door neighbor, Michael Hench, was impressed by tougher inspections as his new home was being rebuilt in late 1993. Hench went to the construction site for at least a dozen inspections. "The inspectors kept saying, 'You failed' to the builder on little, minor stuff." But Hench believes that the county's efforts made his home more valuable. "Someday when my house goes on the market, I'll tell the realtor and any potential buyer that this house was built after Andrew, it was built to code, and all inspections were made."