Year after year, storm after storm,
these were the homes that were left standing.
And people said, “If I'm going to build in the hurricane zone, this is what I want."
Our homes are exceptionally strong because we use materials that are very
high quality. They're often designed for high-wind zones, and of high-quality material
you can't just go to the store and buy.
Our homes are panelized, so we're pre-manufacturing
sections of it in a factory and then shipping it out to you
on the jobsite.
Our round design is actually a self-supporting roof system, so it
doesn't have any interior load-bearing walls, which means that the inside can be
laid out basically any way that you want.
Total devastation.
We lost part of the roof and most of the ceiling.
But I'm still alive.
Still here kicking.
I took pictures of this place and the whole neighborhood the day before.
We were all out here, all the neighbors. They just had their new roofs installed
from the hailstorm.
Everybody was cleaning up.
We were getting ready for the weekend of fun. And then Harvey.
So everybody's like, “Okay, well we're going to leave."
Because most of those people are vacation people,
you know, they don't live here full time. Not like us.
Hurricane Harvey barreling into the Texas coastline.
Storm surges are predicted to reach up to 12 feet.
The city of Rockport, Texas, is right in Harvey's path and is getting hit hard.
I felt like I… this was a nuclear
war had happened here, and my neighbors had been bombed.
It was, it was hard
and gut-wrenching to see the damage that a lot of people
have suffered through, and their whole life is forever changed by this.
Climate change is something that is hard to not think about when you see
hurricane after hurricane after hurricane. The wildfires that have just
hit California. It really makes you think about “If I'm gonna build a home,
what is it going to be like 20 years from now? 50 years from now? 100 years from now?”
I'm not just designing for today, but I'm designing for generations into the future.
And what's it gonna take to make sure that we resist those things?
Having a lot that was half a block from the water, we thought we really need
something that is hurricane resistant. And this round house concept, they can't
bill as, "hurricane-proof,” but when you look through the gallery pictures, there
sure are a lot of pictures, as ours is now, of the Deltec house standing tall
while everything around it is shattered.
I think resilience, like passive survivability, is the concept of building a home
that can withstand all kinds of weather extremes.
It’s something that we have been really good at, and
I want us to keep improving in that direction.
Obviously, this round shape
makes sense in a high-wind environment, and we're able to get a lot less
pressure building up on that home, just because of that design.
But how do we go above and beyond that? Beyond just the shape?
How do we engineer that to be even stronger?
And so you see this, what we call “radial engineering,” where it's like
spokes on a wheel. And the entire home is like this wheel that works together,
so the entire system is set up to resist those high winds. There really is nothing
about what we do that is rocket science.
It is a simple concept. And we have
really perfected it over the last 50 years in the way that everything fits
together and works together.
And to me, what's really special about the Deltec is
there's this combination of science and sort of high-tech
manufacturing. But then, it blends so well with what I call, "the old-world
craftsmanship." We're building this home. It’s out of wood. It's not like it's some
new high-tech material. But the way that it performs is above and beyond really
what any other wood home can do.