OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.-The powerful tornadoes in this state last week damaged or destroyed numerous credit union branches, and left employees in many facilities seeking safety and shelter inside vaults.
The weeks and months ahead will be consumed with the day-to-day demands of the clean-up and rebuilding. The question for the longer term is whether facilities should be built to better withstand such storms. Not surprisingly, it's a discussion that often comes down to a cost/benefits analysis.
"We've done a lot of (FI branches) over the years," said Walt Henry, principal at Bockus Payne Associates Architects in Oklahoma City. "What's interesting is that depending on the client, some of them try to stay on the low end cost wise ... and other ones don't."
Every new credit union branch must meet local building codes, but those codes can vary widely. While the International Building Code (IBC) is the standard for nearly all construction projects, municipality rules also play a significant part in the process.
"You can literally do two branches that are half a mile apart, and if there's a municipality division line between them, there may be a completely different set of codes that you have to go by," observed Henry.
Municipality requirements generally use the IBC as a base, but individual building permits also take into account comments from the municipality, the fire marshal, FEMA requirements and more.
Compounding the confusion is that the IBC is regularly revised, and different municipalities use different editions of the code. Oklahoma City, for example, uses the International Building Code of 2003, said Jennifer King, production administration manager at Cincinnati-based design firm DEI.
King noted that nearly all of the requirements in Miami-Dade County, Florida, were put in place following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and much of that code is built around surviving those major storms. Similarly, she said, codes in Chicago are based around fire, while codes in California are strict to help protect against earthquakes.
Not Everything's Up To Date
Many municipalities-particularly large cities, said King-are wary of making their building codes too strict out of fear that they'll frighten away new business development to another city and lose that potential revenue.
So why not use the most up-to-date version of the IBC? Bockus Payne's Henry said that it can often take months-or even years-for individual municipalities to work through their own revisions to building codes and add their own verbiage, by which time an updated version of the code may have been released.
"They don't just adopt he code, per se, they adopt the code plus all of their specific requirements," he said.
Moore, Okla., which sustained the brunt of last week's tornadoes, was hit by similar storms in 1999, and Mayor Glenn Lewis (who has been mayor since 1994) pushed through changes to building ordinances to require stronger protections against storms. Early news reports have stated that many facilities built after those storms survived last week's tornadoes, while buildings constructed before the new rules were not spared during the storms. Lewis has said he plans to push for a new ordinance that would require all new homes to have reinforced tornado shelters.
Communications FCU in Oklahoma City, for instance, saw some success in 2011 marketing loans for storm shelters which could be built into the floor of a member's garage (CU Journal, June 6, 2011).
At a credit union branch in Oklahoma, however, subterranean facilities are not always feasible because of the ground on which the facility stands-either due to high groundwater or heavy clay or because of the type of foundation on which it sits. That's one reason so many CU employees had to flee to safety inside vaults.
Bob Zahl, a co-founder of Oklahoma City structural engineering firm Zahl-Ford recommended that FIs enlarge their vault space to double as a safe room-a move that can not only protect employees, but can be done at a comparatively low cost.
Henry and others said more and more institutions are moving toward putting in place some kind of safe room to protect employees. Those areas may be two or four times the minimum safety standards for the rest of the building, said Henry, but those measures can also be prohibitively expensive.
"It probably isn't feasible to do that for every building that comes along, because all of a sudden a $2-million building becomes a $4-million building, and then it doesn't make sense for the developer or the owner to even do it at that point," he said.
At Wichita, Kan.-based Meritrust CU's headquarters, the IT room is completely surrounded by reinforced concrete to help protect against tornadoes. A Meritrust branch being built in Manhattan, Kan., is being built with a vault-like safe room. CEO James Nastars explained that the facility is being constructed atop an existing parking lot, as it was not conducive to constructing a basement there.
No Line In The Sand
While there's no particular line in the sand to determine what kind of winds a building can sustain, the IBC requires coastal areas to build for a 135-mile-per-hour wind load and non-coastal areas to design for a 90-mile-per-hour wind load. "Importance factors" are then placed on top of those figures to add in extra safety precautions for buildings like homes or hospitals, but the sort of sustained wind speed a building can maintain is dependent upon many, many things, including the basic structure and design of the facility.
In the end, many said, it's just not economically practical to build a branch that can withstand the kind of winds a tornado brings. Builders must weigh both cost and potential risk and find a happy medium.
Bob Zahl noted that when tornadoes hit Moore in 1999, they brought 318-mile-per-hour wind loads.
"You just can't design for that for a whole building," he said. "You can pick a certain portion of the building and design for that, but there's no way that you could pass a code that just because they live in Oklahoma they have to design their building for that. That's just not a feasible deal."
