It was windy in New York today. Gusts up to 50 MPH. I was driving by Seagirt Blvd in Inwood and there were 2 houses being framed. One was framed 1st and 2nd floor up to roof and the other fell down!!! On top of a car!! Guess they didn’t brace that job to well. One giant game of pick-up-sticks. Man o man. Glad I wasn’t running that job.
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Unfortunately, I've been involved in several of these. They're well worth avoiding.
Typically they go something like this, when trusses are involved: Customer calls, says the house he was framing blew down. Wants to know if we'll send out the crane to stand the roof trusses back up. Unfortunately, the answer is "NO".
The reasoning behind the refusal is this: When trusses fall/blow over, they can obviously be subjected to streses way beyond the capacity of the lumber. Some of the damage can easily be seen - Broken webs, chords, etc. But some of the damage might be hidden. So the engineers we use won't design repairs for trusses that have been involved in a collapse of any sort.
The builders tend to get really, really ticked off at this point. They assume we just want to sell them another set of trusses. But that's not really the case. We would be subject to a HUGE amount of liability if we oferred advice on something our engineers wouldn't back up. Really leaves everybody in a bad spot.
So what do you do? The best thing is obviously to prevent the collapse in the first place. Do a decent job of bracing in the first place. Every job that I've seen come down had very poor bracing. Skimping on bracing is easy to do, as framers tend to see it as a waste of time to put something up that they'll only have to remove later.
Never set trusses on Friday and leave them over the weekend without plywood on the roof.
Read the bracing sheets that the truss companies send out. I haven't seen a roof yet that was braced like they show in those sheets - I know they're awfully conservative. But they offer some sound advice and ideas.
Use diagonal braces to brace the bracing. (This is one of the ideas from the bracing sheets) Every job I've seen come down had few diagonal braces, or none at all. Imagine standing up a row of dominoes, and hooking them all together. Push one over, they all fall together. Unless the bracing is fastened to something solid it isn't stable.
One builder that I knew fairly well went through a collapse once. The insurance adjuster all but called him a swindler for having a claim right after he took out a builder's risk policy. They told him to get a crane out there and remove the trusses so they didn't damage the rest of the structure. Then the adjuster came out and accused him of removing the trusses to hide evidence. They drug the investigation on forever, and gave him a lot of grief.
Ended up taking up almost a week of his time, setting the house about 2 weeks behind schedule, and costing him several thousand doollars. (According to him)
A pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the butt.