You missed the most important detail of my reply. VB DOESN'T SEE REAL HURRICANES. PERIOD. Show me one hurricane in the last 25 years that has done substantial wind damage to VB. It has all been flooding damage. Again, up until last year I lived there all my life.
Well it is true, you only need that door lock for the few minutes when the burglar is trying the latch. Other than that, you can leave the door unlocked. The problem is, when will he arrive?
The building code is a minimum, you can exceed the code. Prescriptive codes tell you what meets the code
at a minimum, so if you wish to build above that standard, you will have a greater degree of protection.
If the requirement is 120 mph rating and wind pressure levels of certain values, it's relatively cheap to exceed those in your build and as I mentioned, the high-velocity hurricane zone (HVHZ) rated products, labelled as complying with the Miami-Dade County (FL) product approval rating are going to do a better job of protecting your most-expensive asset (most peoples'), your home.
Having been a first responder for many hurricanes, and having spent time going from one building to the next, searching for victims, or from one plot to the next, searching through the rubble, after a catastrophic failure of the envelope's complete structural failure, I would and have exceeded the minimum requirement, given the choice, at our principal residence. After Andrew, I was part of a crew which went as a work party to do a complete tear-off of a co-worker's single family residence roof. I'll never-forget being on his roof, and as-far as you could see, in every direction, homes missing their shingles/tiles/tarred-down flat roofs. An interesting feature, as the eye passed-over the area, the wind originates from opposite direction. The pine trees were totally-denuded of their branches, except in one direction. For 345 degrees, the branches were gone, ripped-off the pine trees, but for that 15 degree position, the lee-side of the wind direction, where the tree trunk sheltered the branches, in a vertical line from the lowest branches to the highest. It was a very-graphic depiction of the force of the wind, and the direction from-which it came. The hurricane gave the pine trees a Mohawk! Their neighbor had a flat-roof family room on the back of their home, and all that was left were three walls extending-off the main structure. All the rafters/trusses, the roof sheathing, the waterproof covering, probably tar and gravel at that time, just-gone!
My -ex sister in law lived much-closer to where Hurricane Andrew made landfall in south Miami-Dade County FL. She was living in a recently-built home, so she assumed they would be safe there, which wasn't the case. Just before the storm made landfall, it was predicted to hit the county line between Miami-Dade County and Broward County (city of Miami and city of Ft. Lauderdale metro areas) but it took a turn to the south, and made landfall in Homestead (those of you who are NASCAR fans will recognize that). When the storm arrived, she was trapped, and had to wait it out. She called another family member, and was giving a running commentary about the sounds she heard. She said that the house, a 2-story, was constantly being bombarded by what she assumed was air-borne debris slamming-against the house. They were taking refuge in a bathroom on the 1st floor. She heard a tremendous sound and the wind noise got much louder, and her last report before the phone line went dead (not many people had cellphones in 1992) was, "I think the roof just came-off the house!" Then the phone went dead. The storm hit at night, by the morning, it was all-over but for the inspection of damage. That, and a couple of years of demolition, replacement of thousands of homes, repairs to thousands of others, and to all-sorts of structures. She took the insurance check and moved from Miami-Dade County to Broward County.
http://www.miamidade.gov/building/library/productcontrol/noa/17080925.pdf
