 I want to welcome all of you this afternoon to the ESI briefing, hidden in plain sight, buildings as safe and resilient infrastructure. My name is Jared Blum. I have the honor of serving as chair of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. Our illustrious executive directors allowed me to participate in this. One Carol Warner who's here for all our briefings and indeed there have been many. For those of you who don't know about ESI, maybe this might be your first briefing. I think there may be one or two of you who've not been here before. We've been around for about 35 years. We were the visionary product of bipartisan group of congresspeople in the mid-80s. And since that time we've been providing a forum for constructive and positive solutions to pressing environmental energy problems. Which of course, resilient infrastructure is one of those. How do we create them? How do we fund them? First of all, thank everybody for coming to this day's event. I think most of you may recall the one that we had scheduled, ironic as it may appear, was canceled due to inclement weather, wind gusts which we've not seen in the city in quite a long time. ESI is proud to present a series of briefings on this issue with respect to building safe and resilient infrastructure with our partner in the National Association of State Energy Offices. They've been with us now. This is our seventh briefing. I'm pleased to see we've had great turnouts, literally standing in room only for all of them. And the fact is, this issue is an interdisciplinary challenge. I mean, whether you are a contractor, an architect, an engineer, a landscaper, an urban planner, a policymaker, a city council person, it is something that spans multi-disciplines. And what we're trying to do today is to create a forum where we have a couple of pieces of that puzzle, so to speak, that will come and speak to us today. And I think we've got a great group for you. Before we do that, I would like to thank Congress from Welch for sponsoring our room today and the Polyiso Cyanide Insulation Manufacturers Association, that's a mouthful, and the EEPDM Roofing Association for our lunches. Mark Fowler from Congress and Welch's office is here to speak us real briefly about the high-performance building caucus. Mark, you want to take a couple of moments? Great. Well, thanks, Jared. And thanks, Ellen and Carol and the ESI team for organizing everything and to our panelists for joining. I just wanted to quickly mention the Congressional High-Performance Building Caucus. It's a caucus chaired by my boss, Congressman Welch and Congressman David McKinley from West Virginia, and it's focused on a lot of the similar issues that we're going to be dealing with today. So things like, you know, what policies help make sustainable buildings, how do we improve the resiliency and energy efficiency of buildings, and we have some great downtown partners made up of everyone from engineers to installers to insulation manufacturers and many more that we work with. We'd love to have all of your bosses join. And again, my name is Mark Fowler if I can answer any questions about that. So thanks and look forward to the presentation. Thanks, Mark. Thanks very much and thank you for your bosses' support and participation in the caucus. You know, it's not an easy job to try and do these briefings and try and bring in all the necessary parts. I mean, we have had luck in the sense of people have wanted to do this. We've had members of Congress, former members of Congress. We've had city councilmen. We've had admirals and generals who have sat at the table here and have told us about the national security implications of a resilient infrastructure. What we're going to do today, we're not going to be talking about a piece of the puzzle that we all are familiar with in terms of the electricity and energy providing parts of the puzzle. We're really focusing more now on how do we stay safe? How do we physically keep the barrier between us as citizens and inhabitants from, how shall we say this, a mother nature? I guess if nature is a mother, somebody should be arresting her for child abuse because she really is giving us a piece of her mind. What I'd like to do is start off in the speaking order, so to speak. I'd like to start with setting the table for us in terms of the 10,000 feet discussion of the challenge to the built environment by the changing climate. And I want our first speaker to do that. She's with the Institute for Building Health and Safety. Her name is Deborah Ballin, and I'll read to you a little bit about her. She's very eminently qualified to do this. She joined the Institute for Business and Home Safety in 2008 as the General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Public Policy. She's responsible for all of the IBHS legal matters and oversees a number of important public policy initiatives, including building codes, adaptation, community resilience, and economic incentives for mitigation. Prior to her work with IBHS, Ms. Ballin was the Executive Vice President of Public Policy Management for the American Insurance Association. She developed and implemented policy for AIA's priority federal and state public policy issues. Now, when Deborah is done, I'm going to move on to go down from 10,000 feet and let's get right on the ground. And nothing's more, well, roofing is almost on the ground, Reed, but close. We're going to get to the building. We're going to get to where the quality of the building materials and the installation of the contracting matters. And we're going to have someone who knows a heck of a lot about that. The Honorable Reed Ribble is the CEO of the National Roofing Contractors Association. Before becoming CEO, Reed served six years in the U.S. House of Representatives. During his tenure, he served on the agriculture, transportation and infrastructure, real important, budget and finance and foreign affairs committees, where he served as vice chairman of the Committee on Emerging Threats. During his time in Congress, Reed met with more than 25 heads of state and his capacity on the Committee of Foreign Affairs traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And batting cleanup, which I'm actually not correct because you're number three, cleanup would be number four, but we'll give you that title anyway, Paul. Paul Totten is a vice president of WSP and leads the Building Enclosures Division. He has over 21 years of experience in the fields of structural engineering, building enclosure design and commissioning and building science. He has concentrated his expertise on the evaluation and analysis of heat, air and moisture transfer and the cumulative effect these elements have on a building components and building operation. He is past co-chair of the Washington D.C. AIA NIBS Building Enclosure Council, a member of NIBS, ASHRAE and the U.S. GBC Green Building Council, and a committee member of the National Institute of Building Scientists, guideline three. We're going to take questions after the three of them present, if we could, as a panel. I will try and moderate as best as I can. So why don't we start off, Deborah? You're the leadoff. You're taller than I am. Congressman Ribble has suggested that we can invite the standees to take the committee chairs behind me. And since I feel he's authorized to do that, I would never have taken upon myself to do that, but please do that. Unfortunately, the slides are facing the audience right now. So if you choose that, you'll have to listen to us. But thank you. Let's see. Let's move me on to me. I'm Deborah Ballin with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. And we are a building science organization. So really, it is a pleasure to be here at an event that is focusing so directly on the importance of buildings. Buildings are where people live, buildings are where people work, and they are vital for community resilience and our nation's resilience. So while there are other aspects of resilience that can be talked about, I really love coming in just talking about the buildings. And the major focus for what we are doing is on the roof. Roofs, as you'll hear a lot about them today from Congressman Ribble, roofs are responsible for more damage than any other part of a building. The damage to the roof, but also the damage to the interior. If the roof is compromised, pieces of the roof or rooftop equipment can blow off a roof and cause damage to adjacent structures. And one of the things that we say about a building, a building without a roof in the event of a rainstorm, a severe rainstorm, is really just a big bucket waiting to fill up with water. And therefore, it becomes uninhabitable or unworkable. So I'm not going to say anything more on that other than we work closely with the NRCA and support everything they do in the resilience space. And I do look forward to hearing more from what he has to say about it. So here's a video. Let's start with that because people love the IBHS videos. This was actually the video. You saw the roof blown right off. The roof blows off. There goes the building. This was the way we opened the IBHS Research Center in 2010. We did a side-by-side comparison of a home that was built to the building code in Bloomington, Illinois, and one that surpassed the building code by being built to the IBHS fortified standard. And I'm happy to report that the one that stayed up was the one that was built to our standard. And here's a commercial one. That one you're going to need to run. This is a commercial analog. And I know Congressman Ribble's organization does a lot with respect to commercial roofs as well. This was not, we're going to see the back of the building first. And you're going to see what happens to the doors, the roll-up doors. One was built to a higher standard, and one was built to a common standard. And while there wasn't a building code of the Masonry Institute in this case, we did work closely with them. And we're supposed to turn this around in just a second. And you'll see what happens to the common versus the stronger building. There we go. Common versus stronger. We blew out the windows, because that often happens in a high wind event. And then we went to see what would happen if the interior got pressurized as a result of the windows. The roofing was not as adequate. In fact, it was inadequate, as you can see on the common side. And if you just wait a minute, you'll see it's not just about the roof. There goes your building. And it was 10 times more damage to the common side versus the stronger side, as well as a building that is out of business. So it really is about resilience not only for your building, but for your business, for your community, as well. Let's look briefly at the Atlantic hurricane season, which, as you know, was unprecedented in many ways and does underscore the increasing importance of what we are talking about today. Prior to Irma, we had actually done a test at the IBHS Research Center. It was actually intended to look at Midwestern construction. But one of the takeaways that we realized when we looked at that wind performance was that when we had a specimen inside our test chamber and we had closed the interior doors, the building as a whole performed better and, obviously, the components of it. So although the testing reports weren't done, we're a research organization. It takes a long time to get from seeing a building blow down to the official report. We said, we can't wait on this. And so we created a quick social media campaign called Close the Doors on Irma. And the result of that was within a few days before Irma made landfall in Florida, we got 1.2 million hits to our website where people could see that guidance. We did crash our website briefly, but that was worth it because it was important mitigation guidance. And it was easy to understand, and it was free. I mean, it was cheap in terms of, you know, and all you had to do was close your doors. You didn't have to invest a lot. And in addition to sort of the importance of getting information out at the right time when people can use it, we learned a lot about communications, disaster communications, timing messages, and so forth. And while Irma wasn't as big of a wind problem in Florida because of the strong codes there, millions of people took that guidance and made themselves just a little bit more resilient in the face of that storm. 2017, as you know, was not just a wind year. It was also a severe wildfire year, unprecedented wildfires in California. And this is a map, actually, of Coffee Park, which received a lot of attention, the Northern California fires in October of 2017. And you can see the red spots are the homes that burned. And the interesting thing about it was that the wildfire maps did not consider this a high hazard area. You see that in floods. I mean, you see that in Houston. I mean, parts of Houston that got 50 inches of rainfall and therefore obviously flooded were not high hazards. So, you know, we talk about what we know about future weather, but what we don't know, you know, is as devastating as what our predictions are. And they underscore why being prepared in advance of any type of a disaster event is critical. Because sometimes there's warning in the case of Irma, you could read that guidance and close your doors. In the case of these wildfires, I mean, they just took off and, you know, I'm sure you all read the reports. People basically being saved by being in their swimming pools. I mean, that's not an ideal way to deal with things. Here's a wildfire video as well. And a lot of the information that we were able to put forward, defensible space, for example, on wildfire, we've done testing of these things. We work very closely with the fire sciences community. And we are able to come out with that, you know, both sort of sophisticated research results that help influence codes and standards, but also things on defensible space, things on attic vents, the importance of not having wide screens in your attic and not putting flammables in your attic, which then can become the fuel. So these are the kinds of things that are important from a communications perspective. And then ultimately, you know, in your public policy organization, the goal is to really sort of wrap it all up and make change at a much broader level. But in the meantime, we're willing to do house by house combat. If individual homeowners, individual business owners can take our guidance and become more resilient. I mentioned codes and standards. Building codes for those of you who are not familiar with them are done by a consensus-based process in the United States, first at a model code level, and then they have to be adopted by individual states. And sometimes that's an acrimonious process, not all states have them. In fact, IBHS just released its latest report, which we called Rating the States, and we look at the building codes and all the hurricane-prone areas from Texas to Maine. You can find that on our website. I apologize. It hadn't been released the time we scheduled this, so I didn't have a slide on that, but it's out now. But we also realized that an individual homeowner or an individual business owner can go above code and therefore become more resilient. So we developed a set of standards and a set of inspection requirements that we called fortified that are a way to implement a resilient design that goes above code. It's done at a voluntary level. There's a couple of jurisdictions in Alabama that have required it at their local level. But for the most part, we're trying to engage people and business owners to take that extra step, make a small investment in mitigation to become safer and sounder in the event of an event. And you can see we do this at the home level as well as the business level. The difference between the fortified program and LEED, which a lot of you are probably familiar with, it's two-fold. One, I mentioned we do have an inspection requirement to make sure all the stuff actually gets in. But homes are systems or buildings are systems. And in order to achieve the resilience that you want, you have to do everything in a part of the building that is your system. So we have a bronze level, which focuses on the roof when we've talked very closely with the NRCA, we're talking to them about some possible training in those standards to go the next level to silver, which is your doors and windows. And the next level is gold, which is a continuous load path. And that was one of the things that we tested over the course of the summer against Midwest winds. But you can't protect some of your doors and windows and think that it's all gonna work. I mean, I remember talking to my greatest grassroots sort of test case, which is my 90-year-old mother, who said, but I got a shutter over my biggest window. Isn't that enough? And I said, no, it's not enough because the wind can break another window and that's a problem. So we look at the building as a system and we understand, as our fortified manager says, you don't get what you expect, you get what you inspect. So we do require that verification to show that really your home is stronger than the local code. And here's what a fortified homeowner had to say. And you can see, I mean, the challenge that we have is convincing people that this is where they should be spending some of their money. We like to say, we want people to have a strong, to understand the value of a strong roof and not just a strong granite countertop. And that's the challenge that we have sort of the way that homes are bought and sold. The builders and the real estate agents, except in coastal Alabama, really aren't talking about the value that is really imbued in a fortified home, a stronger home, but it's there. So we're in Washington. I wanted to mention some of the political challenges and perhaps Congressman Ribble will talk about some of these things. But unfortunately, there's a lot of gridlock here. It's hard to get done the things that even everyone agrees to. Although I'm happy to say that with the February budget legislation, they actually did pass both programmatic changes to incentivize states to do better, as well as some additions to mitigation grants. And these are some of the things that certainly we can talk about in terms of really moving forward, finding the win-wins, the resilient building caucus, that's a great kind of thing. It's getting people together, events like this, that have people sort of walking away and saying, boy, I think what I heard today made a lot of sense, and this is something that we need to think about, how do we make this work from a public policy perspective? So I hope I'm not over my time, but I'm gonna pass on the clicker to Congressman Ribble. Thank you very much. A very important announcement, and that is for those of you that are standing up there and didn't get fed, we did order some additional food so it should be coming momentarily. I am going to yield the rest of my time back to the congressman. Well, good afternoon. Is it okay if I just talk right from here? You all can hear me? Mark, thanks for making the space available, having been in this role and worked very closely with your boss. I can tell you that Congressman Welch is one of the best members of this entire body and I appreciate him making this available. And I'm a Republican, he's a Democrat, we're very far apart on a lot of the political issues, and I have a profound respect for Congressman Welch. I wanna talk a little bit about history because I think history is important so that we can kind of understand that everything is interconnected. We saw some of the video there that was in the IVHS wind tunnel, but I wanna take you back to the mid 2000s. In 2004, there were four hurricanes that went through Florida. And then 2005, one of those was Hurricane Andrew, and then 2005, you had the big hurricane, Hurricane Katrina that went through New Orleans. And many of you who were old enough to actually watch that video or maybe live through it if you're from Louisiana, you saw what really became a modern version of an American refugee coming out of their homes that were destroyed going to the Superdome. At the time, about halfway through that storm, the roof on the Superdome was performing perfectly well. In fact, it was a fully adhered EPDM rubber roof that was 60 mils thick. For those of you who don't understand the thickness, think in terms of about 50 pieces of paper compressed together, that's about 60 mils of thickness. That roof was performing perfectly fine and people were secured out of the weather. However, across the street was a high rise hotel owned either by Marriott, Sheridan, Hyatt, whoever. And as you saw in the windows, as you saw in the video, windows often will break. The windows blew out of that hotel. They then became glass missiles that landed on the roof of the Superdome across the street. When that glass, sharp bits of glass penetrated the membrane, it now created a flap that could get captured in the wind and off the roof went. That roof probably would have performed even with 150 miles an hour had that debris that had gotten caught up in the air, not struck the building. And everything would have been fine. And that's why all of these things matter. It's not just about how good the roof is because we can put a roof on. I can tell you with great amount of confidence, if you're willing to spend the money, we can put a roof on that will not only last a very long time, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, but we can put a roof on that'll hold up in 150 or 160 mile an hour wind. What we can't do and what we haven't been able to do is design a roof that can handle a pane of glass that's four feet by four feet with sharp edges flying at 300 miles an hour into it. And so there lies the complexity of trying to create a system of resilient buildings in light of what happens around you when a non-resilient building fails. Let's stop and fast forward now to 2017. Two major hurricanes hit the United States. We had the hurricane in Houston which damaged 300,000 homes. So 300,000 homes in Houston have to be replaced. But they don't have to be replaced because of wind. They have to be replaced because of flooding. And so there's no building code per se short of putting every single one of those houses in the flood zone and for those who live in New York, you understand it because Hurricane Sandy did something similar where a wind surge pushed water onto the land and brought water into these buildings. And now the buildings have to be replaced. However, the roofs in Houston actually held up pretty well. There was very little roof damage there even though we had winds in excess of 100 miles an hour. Hurricane Irma on the other hand, class five hurricane that hit the Florida Keys damaged 150,000 roofs. However, that damage was dramatically reduced compared to what had happened with Hurricane Andrew just a decade or so before. The state of Florida had moved very aggressively in coastal regions to increase the building code to, in essence, up the game to keep roofs on. Some of the science that's going on at IBHS and their wind tunnel for what they're calling a fortified system or fortified home, fortified construction, fortified roofing has all been really good and very insightful for the industry to take a look at. But even then it's more complicated than just figuring out how to put a roof on that will stay in place. So for example, you saw the residential home where the entire structure just disappeared once the windows went open and the home next to it stayed intact. Well, that home next to it can stay intact and I can tell you we can keep a roof intact but using adhesives and things around perimeters to increase the wind resistance only works if that method of attachment doesn't damage the roof 10, 12, 14 years down the road. So the roofing industry is working with the insurance industry in helping design that fortified system in a way that when we meld components that may not be chemically compatible and a scientist who's looking at wind can think that an adhesive that holds it on is the right thing to do, we can look at that adhesive and say, yeah, adhering that is correct but you can't use that adhesive because we've got a chemical conflict with the two materials. And so getting that right takes a lot of time and then quite frankly, our biggest challenge is getting it to a place where it's economically feasible. Now, you could make the argument that anybody living in a coastal region ought to have and live under a code that requires a certain level of resiliency in that building because the rest of the country who does not live on the coast ends up paying for that as we just saw within a congressional appropriation of billions of dollars to pay for Irmin and Harvey as well as the hurricane that went through Puerto Rico. And there's a huge societal cost when this stuff doesn't get done to an idea that we actually know we already know and possess the science to build buildings that will stay in place. And I will tell you if society was willing to pay the price, we could have these things tomorrow. But trying to find an economic model that will work both for that building owner that is in the wind zone or in a coastal region and quite frankly, we could even go into states like Oklahoma where there's an interior Texas where there's huge hail events where you've got too much hail hitting a roof. We can design a roof that'll hold up to that but can we get a customer that's willing to pay for it and not pass that cost onto somebody else? And therein when you start talking in the terms of resiliency, you begin to see the complex nature of coming up with an economic model that works. We live in a society here in the US for those who have not traveled abroad that views buildings and particularly homes much differently than many parts of the world in particular Europe. If you go into many places in Europe, the family home is still multi-generational. So mom and dad buy a home and the kids end up getting that home from mom and dad then the grandkids end up getting the home from them. And these homes are designed and constructed and built to last hundreds of years. We don't live in that type of society. The United States of America and its citizens have always been extraordinarily mobile. They're willing to move around the country to advance their careers or their livelihoods. We have a very diverse country to live in. If you like mountains, you can have mountains. If you get tired of the mountains, you can move inland to a farming area. If you get tired of that, you can move to a coastal region. And Americans have always done that throughout our entire history and we've been among the most mobile societies in history. And as a result of that, no one wants to spend the adequate amount of money that's required to build a resilient home even though that home possesses everything that they value more than anything else. I can tell you just with unequivocation that I value my children and my wife more than anything in my entire life. Where's it that they reside is under that roof and in that building. And if we really truly accept the fact that all those things that we value most in life are there, we can finally begin to move the public to a place where these thinking terms of longer construction, more sustainable construction, which by the way, better for the environment, products are not ending up in the landfill quite as regularly. Obviously if a roof is being damaged in 15 years and that roof ends up in the landfill, that's not a good thing. If that roof lasts 50 years, it's a totally different dynamic. And so getting the public to accept this and then getting codes to adapt like they did very quickly in Florida because we saw pretty good results. Even though you saw 150,000 homes damaged, a lot of those homes were built prior to the code changes. They will now be rebuilt to a different code and will be much more resilient than what they were. As the insurance industry adapts to this change in climate and they begin to have policies that move their customers toward a more fortified system, we're going to be able to deal with that in an even better manner and have more homes. However, the building codes also must address where homes are located. Rebuilding 300 homes in a flood zone may not be the smartest use of money. Should we be thinking about moving those homes? Should we be thinking about elevating those homes? How do we want to as a society address the issue of location in this country as well? And all of those things become a challenge. And then I'm going to wrap up my comments with one other point I want to make. At the end of the day, the person most responsible for the quality of that construction is not the roofing company or the construction company that one hires. It's the actual worker that is installing that roof. There is a massive gap in the United States between where a worker starts and the training that's provided. It is almost a totally ad hoc system. And our association is moving very quickly into the world of certifications with the desire to certify over 100,000 roofing workers over the next decade, as well as when they get a certification, for example, in asphalt shingles and they can actually demonstrate the competency to put that roof on. We will also allow them to get a certification in something like fortified so that the insurance industry can say, we need to have someone who is certified in this discipline to put this roof on in this region of the country. As we begin to do that training and close that gap, we can take some of the human frailty out of it, the mistakes that happen, we will begin to also make an exponential step forward in worker quality. That's why education, and for those of you who have bosses on the Education and Workforce Committee and looking at apprenticeship programs and technical schools and reinvigorating technical training in our high schools, all those things matter because everybody needs it. And we are now, as we sit here today, 20,000 workers short in the roofing industry alone, 300,000 workers short in the U.S. construction industry. And I would be willing to bet if everybody in here was honest with themselves and you don't have to raise your hands, when your son or daughter was born and you cast your eyes down on that child the very first day and you're looking at this newborn in their bassinet, there's not a person in this room that thought, wow, I hope you grow up to be a roofer. And we think this way, but we think this way wrongly. These are high paying jobs that require a great deal of technical skill and many of those types of work are dangerous. And so it's something that we have to begin societally to change our thinking, to shift the nexus, to provide value to the men and women. When you go home tonight and you flip that light switch on in your bedroom, none of you are ever gonna think that that light won't come on. While simultaneously, none of you also will ever think about the man or woman who wired that light so it comes on every single time. And it comes on every single time. That's the quality of the construction work here in the United States. It's very high quality, but we need to honor the men and women who choose to do it so that more men and women will enter that trade and provide the types of buildings we need. Thanks for having me, and I look forward to the questions afterwards. Congressman, thank you for pointing out that last point, this issue of, as we're trying to drive better built buildings, the education of the workforce has to come along. At the ESI, I don't think we've explored that sufficiently. We're gonna try and integrate that issue. I think as we do some additional briefings on this, because you've raised a very, very good point. Paul, clean up, babe. So like Debra, I'm vertically challenged. So let's wait a few seconds for my slides to come up. One thing that I think is important to think about in our building market is that we have commercial residential buildings. We don't necessarily plan for looking at these buildings differently. We don't think about space for shelter in a way that it should be. So I'm off clicker. I think you're gonna have to help me with this one. Here we go. So as we look at our buildings, each building has a different purpose. If we look at a stadium or a museum, we have the purpose of what the building's used for on a daily basis. But we don't really think of these buildings in the form of a disaster. How can we repurpose these buildings into a place of shelter, protection? We're spending taxpayer dollars on a lot of these buildings as they get constructed. And so we need to think of them that way. We have to think about our climate change and our codes and our education of how we actually design for the future. Now, a single building we designed today is actually built for the future. It's built for the past. We design everything to the past. The rate of codes get adopted and debate it takes six to 10 years to get something passed. By the time it's passed, it's already outdated based on the rate of climate change. So we have to think differently about our building stock. We have to think about teaching and training and read absolutely correct. Education of not only owners of buildings and property owners and facilities managers, but also those that build, construct and live and occupy these spaces. So what are the basic requirements of any building? The very basic requirements to provide shelter. And yet we don't think of any building we go into for entertainment or other purposes as a place of shelter. And yet as we saw after Katrina, the Superdome definitely became a large space for shelter in that city. Convention centers, large space for shelter. These areas of assembly could be pre-designed on taxpayer dollars with an infirmary, a hospital, and a means to actually shelter people in the case of a storm. We don't think of our infrastructure into these buildings in the same way. We look at micro-gridding. Micro-gridding is not done all over the US. We look at how long it takes to get our grid back up, even after a basic wind storm. It's amazing at the rate it takes to get something done because we haven't thought about taking things down to a smaller set. We have to think about our life safety. So we build a lot of glass. Glass is great, allows you to see outside. But glass also becomes a huge projectile issue in almost any event. Earthquake, you can have it in fire if the fire risk is large enough. You're gonna blow a glass. We can have it in high wind storms. Where does that glass go? How does it get contained? How does it impact people as they leave a building? What are the safety risks on a curtain wall system when you lose a whole section? How do you load that differently? There's nothing in the code to tell you how to design that ahead of time for that event. And then we can think about the user experience. We still need a building that's gonna be pleasing that somebody's gonna wanna be within. But what is the user experience in the form of disaster? How do they see that building differently? They don't care how it looks as much. They care how it actually protects them. We have a variety of buildings that we build. Each of them are for different purposes. So anything from an office to a school to a large stadium or a museum. And if we look at each of these buildings from an event of how we experience them on a day-to-day basis, we go to a school to learn to be educated about sustainability in different ways of looking at the world. But what do we do when that's needed for a shelter? How do we actually use that space differently? Is it pre-built, pre-thought-through for resiliency on day one? If we look at our museums, the same thing, can these be used to shelter spaces? Usually with the quality of artifacts in these and the cost of those, they're not seen in that way, but could we find a way of getting to that point? This is our climate map as it probably still sits within ASHRAE today. It takes a long time to get the climate data amalgamated and to program it into this map. And so when we actually look at zones around the country, we take the amalgamation of data that's used for our building code. Usually it's for energy code, it's 30 years of amalgamation of data. We're designing buildings from an energy standpoint to like 1995, 1990, 2000 standards. We're not designing for 2020, 2030. We have no iteration within the way that the code is written today to look at climate mapping moving forward and actually using predictive design. This is true with flood maps, although FEMA is updating those more often. It's true with almost any map we use today. When we look at the complexity of our architecture, we take wind loading, for example, from ASC. You take that to any complex architecture building. All the rules of the road in the code do not apply because we're gonna get areas where wind's gonna be built up based on the architecture. And so we have to think about our buildings and take that step forward, especially as designers in those building in a different way, to really think about how do we future-proof these? So we're building a 2030 building today rather than a 2020, 1999 building today. Climate change has huge effect. If we look at a number of areas of the country, not only are these massive storms, hurricanes actually an issue. If we look at last year's hurricane season, it was interesting. If you looked at the track, we actually could have lost a good portion of Florida. We had eight to 10 storms in a row tracking along the same line. That is actually gonna happen more often where we see stuff up and down the East Coast, where these storms are gonna be iterative rather than singular. They may not be at the same high speed of wind. The same is true with tornadoes. If we look at the rate of tornadoes and the volume of tornadoes, we're getting a different type of storm event we're getting today than if we go back to even 1998, 1998, 2000. It's a different pace. And we're not designed for these multiple events one right after another. We're not designed for a preparedness standpoint to deal with multiple disasters. This country proved that last year. We didn't have enough effort for Puerto Rico. We fall apart after two disasters. We barely get through one. And so we're not set up for this. We're not set up for the future planning of this in infrastructure and buildings. When we look at normal rain events, even if we take Washington, DC, we're seeing these short duration, heavy volume storms. So we get to a roof, add a couple extra roof drains to move that volume of water faster so we're not flooding out buildings. And that's a simple thing that we recommend on a lot of our design projects. There's a lot of interest in climate variation. There's some simple tools that we can use. Some of them have been developed by our national labs like Oak Ridge to run an upfront analysis to really assess where we're going with moisture drive in buildings to actually understand where that risk is. The great thing with these tools is you can actually run climate tools through them to look at predictive analysis. And that's something that as designers we can do on day one, but we don't usually institute. We don't have enough people trained in how to use this stuff. We wanna look at wind flow. Every time we build a new development, we actually change wind flow around our infrastructure. And yet there's nothing in our code requiring us to evaluate that. When building A is already there and we build building B. From an energy standpoint, from a wind and weather standpoint, we are not required to assess the neighborhood impact of that new building. The same is true with like water table. So we build in the water table and we build more and more buildings in the water table. We actually shift the height of the water in the water table based on the weight of the building pushing down to drive more water infiltration issues into below grade spaces. Or we like to stick things like emergency generators, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We need to look at where we're putting our critical infrastructure for maintenance and also to get in and out of a building. How do you design the facade to accommodate that? We can look at the responsiveness of buildings. This is a job I did with a good client, Hickok Cole here in DC, where we looked at what is the office building in the future? How do we take something we're doing today and make it responsive to climate? So we can take heat off glass as it gets warmer. The screen wall for this building would adapt, potentially provide more shade in time. And so this is stuff that we can do with existing technology. We can look at it from a heartening standpoint. We have nanotechnology materials we're developing today that I think we need to put more science behind with the national labs industry, kind of working together, institutions, higher ed institutions tied into that, to actually develop stuff that would harden upon impact. So actually we have a hard exterior shell built into the facade in our glazing system. So we cannot do today. And then we have to understand that all this has got a people importance. People design buildings, they occupy buildings, they construct buildings, they maintain buildings. How often do we teach and train and continue to educate the industry on each of these aspects? Does a commercial building owner and their tenants really understand what they need to do in a major disaster? How unprepared are we to get out of a building efficiently? And do we actually know where the nearest next shelter would be for us? There's a lot of life's lost and damage caused by just not knowing the basics of that. When we look at construction, we see what NRCA is doing with their roofers and trying to get to a certain quantity of those trained. How many other associations in the industry are not even there yet? We don't have the education programs to really push that forward. And a lot of it's still, unfortunately, being focused mostly on residential. We don't nearly see the depth in the commercial market. The commercial market has always relied on apprenticeship programs, which by the way, some subs do a great job with within their subcontracting trade. But a lot of times we find that those have fallen off. We don't have the retraining of our people to do the work. They don't know what is a resilient detail. From a design standpoint, our design guides aren't being funded from a federal government level at a high rate. The last one I worked on was the building envelope design guide for the National Institute of Building Science. The last major iteration of change was in 2003. And we've been funding that very slowly with small amounts of funding from government agencies. We're not up to speed. We're fallen off and it's unfortunate because the money is just not there to do it. We need to see these agencies fund it to allow that to progress. And then we have to understand the workmanship that we see today is quite different than what we've seen in the past. We heard the comment on homes in Europe and other places in the world are really built for generations. We haven't built in this country for generations for a really long time. And we need to get back to that thought process of resiliency. Durability is actually something that lasts more than 10 or 15 years. What we build is sacrificial. Your home should be destroyed by a storm and maybe we'll rebuild it. Rebuilding takes time and the emotional and psychological impacts on people are huge. Nobody can ever feel comfortable in that home again because of what's happened. And then what we wanna think about, more about the importance of what actually happens on a site, are we actually going through the process of working together to build a natural building? So it's not just the general contractor, it's not the architect, but the process of commissioning actually has an important role. What we're finding today though is on some of these jobs, commissioning is the band-aid to a larger problem of not having the upfront education. So if we don't have apprenticeship programs where people are being trained properly, a commissioning agent pointing out deficiencies but not really being able to teach as often, maybe because they're also lacking skill set in the way that they're doing the work, can be an issue. However, if we have a well-trained workforce coupled with a well-trained group of commissioning agents, those two things work extremely well together where the teaching can happen on both ends. So somebody from our profession comes out and looks at a building and points out a deficiency but can also show the worker a better way of doing it. And so it doesn't need to be a two-fold front and back end of these jobs to do that education. And with that, I will leave that open to questions. Well, thank you, all three of you. You've demonstrated that we have the technological know-how. The question then becomes, how do we fund it? How do we get it to be in people's DNA? And I guess my question for all three of you to start is what's the greatest impediment? We talked about building codes and how long it takes from six to eight years, Paul, to get them adopted. Are building codes the answer short-term? What should be done at the federal and the local levels to try and encourage resilience from a public policy standpoint? So maybe I'll take that first. I think one of the things I think is probably more important is, so you can have a code, but the code isn't really gonna get to you to the point of actually understanding how to implement that code. I actually think education is probably a better spot for us to start. Everything from STEAM programs at grade and elementary school, so that our future generations actually have a good understanding by the time they hit university of how to do this. We'll have more people interested in construction. Construction's getting quite advanced. We're seeing robotics and other ways of actually erecting buildings that are quite difficult to put up, now being implemented around the US and around the world. This does require a larger technical understanding of how to run equipment and computers. So I see this crossover actually happening within the industry now, but we are not prepared to actually implement it without having enough people educated. So I think education at its core is gonna be extremely important. Well, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit since here we are in Washington, and I'm gonna talk about the importance of understanding the return on mitigation investment. Paul, you mentioned NIBS a few minutes ago. They, that's the National Institute of Building Sciences, they have at least partially, I think they're calling it an interim report, but just updated a 2005 report that looks at the return on federal investments in mitigation, six to one on federal grant dollars, and they looked at private investments that go above code four to one. One of those was actually the IBHS fortified wind program, and that was a five to one investment. So I think that here in Congress, or in the agencies, they need to understand that these are good investments to make, that these are not partisan investments to make, that these are not foolish investments to make, but that if we want in the long term to have a better built environment, that includes building codes, that includes new construction to fortified, but it also includes retrofitting what we have. I think a lot of times we focus on putting new stuff up better, and that's very important, but the building stock doesn't turn over very frequently, and most of what you see, we want here to be here for a while, so it's a question of retrofitting. When you get a new roof, re-roof the right way, so people don't intuitively understand that, but one way to get them to understand it better is to focus on that return on investment. Congressman? Yeah, I would say two things. First of all, we have to stop hiding the true cost. The cost often gets hidden when if too much taxpayer dollars are involved in the rebuilding, there's not a lot of incentive for building owners to actually own the problem themselves, and that cost gets hidden if someone else is paying. Well, there's not the right incentive then to actually do it the correct way. Secondarily to that, there's the old adage, how do you eat an elephant in one bite at a time? And the real approach I think you need to take is you take a look at that wind map and where real difficult climate events occur in the country and focus your attention there, and you get the biggest return, and then you can begin to spread that to other regions of the country and deal with other climate-related crises. So you start with wind and hurricanes and whatnot along the coastal regions of the Southeast. You then go into the central and plain states and deal with hail. You get into the tornado zones and deal with that, and you do them systematically, and you begin to create a proof example that it actually works as you step into it that way, and I think that those two things would take us a long way. Thank you. Actually, one of the, I would seem to be one of the best things we could do is have a government that is prepared, so to speak, to deal with this in an interagency way, and I actually, Jeremy Marcus is here from Congress and current rights office. Gonna, a couple of moments, just to make a brief comment about your legislation. Well, thanks EESI again for giving me a few minutes to talk about something we've been working on for the last few years that we think is a really common sense way for the federal government to help repair ourselves better for these events. As many of you may know, the GAO for the past three high-risk reports, which identify the biggest fiscal vulnerabilities that federal government had have identified extreme weather as something that federal government needs to do better job preparing for, and so we've introduced something called the Prepare Act that does really three common sense things that we think could help us better ready ourselves for the increased prevalence of extreme weather that we're all seeing. The first is an interagency council where we would have the folks come together, decide the best practices, make sure agencies are doing their work, and have a coordinating body for the federal government to look at extreme weather preparedness. The second thing we would do is make sure each agency is having their own extreme weather plans and looking at how they're gonna fulfill the mission of their agency and how extreme weather will impact their mission and how they can fulfill it and what fiscal vulnerabilities they have. And the third is a state and regional approach, both coordinating federal responses. We've talked to a lot of state and regional people and say we have different agencies coming in doing different things, but they aren't necessarily talking to each other. So having regional meetings, having regional plans that focus on the specific needs of each individual area and how they're preparing and how they're coordinating with the federal government and how the federal government is getting the best available information out to folks on the ground. So I'm pleased to say we have over 60 organizations, think tanks, businesses that have endorsed it. IBHS is one of them that's been a big supporter of the bill. We'd love to have the roofers on as well if you're interested. And the bill has passed unanimously out of OGR. It was actually supposed to be marked up by TNI last week. It got snowed out. The irony wasn't lost on us, but hopefully it'll be moving through TNI. And we'd love to get anyone here, whether it's from an organization who might wanna get more information or support it or you're from an office. We're still looking for co-sponsors. It's a bipartisan bill. I think we have about 25 co-sponsors. You have hopefully picked up the one page on your way in. It's almost evenly split R&D. So we think this is a good bipartisan solution that actually is moving and the federal government can do some real common sense things to be better prepared. So yeah, I'll hang out if anyone wants more information of the bill, I'll be around afterwards. Happy to chat with anyone about it. Thanks. Do we have time for some questions for any of the panelists? Do we have questions from the audience at this point for the panelists? Yes, sir. Well, I'm not sure. I was wondering about hearing a little more about solar on roofs in the future and both as a way to provide decentralized power when there are storms and you lose centralized power options. And I wonder how solar systems have been holding up in these storms and whether they're being designed for these adverse conditions well enough too. Great. Yeah, I think in looking at micro gridding, it's not just solar. There's all sorts of technologies we can use for alternative power. And I think in this country, we don't really explore a lot of the other solutions as well. You can look at it from where you are in the region of the US, whether wind power or something else might be more appropriate. As far as the panels themselves, both from a tear off standpoint and from a surface damage standpoint, they don't always do well in super high end storms. We can see resiliency in that. The difficulty is that the more we build up resiliency on the top, we reduce the performance of the panel. So we have to look at the trade off. I think it's looking at ways of bringing in power that's alternative quickly. So whether we have equipment that FEMA or somebody else has on stock to deploy large solar arrays quickly after a storm event would probably be more important in addition to having that infrastructure set up up front where we can plug and play either being on building or if it actually happens after a major storm event where that on building is no longer effective, it's off building, plugging into the same grid, which I think is a better way of planning from a micro gridding standpoint. Yeah, we've actually done some testing at our research center about the wind performance of commercial solar arrays on commercial buildings. And some of the results haven't been published yet, but there are concerns. There are concerns about whether they performed to the design wind speed, which we haven't found one yet that has. I should say that we looked at ballasted systems and we've talked to the roofing industry about that. I mean, can you anchor them and then you have problems with the roofing materials? So it is a really complicated question about how do you take these systems that were sort of designed for sunny days and that's why they call them solar and understand that storms happen and they really do need to perform better than they potentially do. There aren't a lot of data points out there in terms of what's actually happened to them just because of where they've been and where the winds have blown. We were thinking that Sandy would have offered a pretty good place to look because there are a lot of incentives in New Jersey, but the winds actually in Sandy were not that great. I'm sure you've got some perspective from the roofers. The first certification we did was for solar and we've already got several hundred certified solar installers. However, the problem with solar is again, a bit more nuanced. You have to remember that that's a live power plant. I mean, it is a power plant that's up on a building and there's great resistance by the code writing bodies because the fire departments want to know if a fire starts and they have to take water up on that roof and you now have this electricity generating product right there. It creates a whole different level of safety problems. It would be our contention that solar panels best placed on the ground, not up on the roof. And so we can, with the right amount of funds, if a customer is ready to pay the money, we can put a solar panel on a roof and it'll stay there up to 150 miles an hour. We know that we can do that. We've got the technology to do that and so it's possible. Solar panel, now built in the roof. It's not on top anymore. It is the roof. So there's no such thing as installing on top. What do you mean there's no such thing as installing on top? The panel is in the roof. Oh, no, I understand what you're saying. I'm just telling you that you're wrong. I mean, this is my entire life. There's one manufacturer that actually makes a panel that is built in as part of the waterproofing but that system is not even code compliant. It's not even legal to install in the country yet. Thank you. To the back of the, yes, sir. Dylan, that's you. The question is for the record, how effective are vegetative roofs in performing in storms like this? They can perform pretty well but as you're aware, vegetation gets damaged just like it does on the ground, right? And so when you get high wind events, depending on whether that's an intensive or extensive vegetated roof, it's a very difficult thing to install and know for sure that the wind is gonna stay there because on four inches of soil media, that's not a lot. If you've got sedums, it can take the whole thing right off. If you get to where you got 12, 14, 16 inches of soil and you have bigger trees, well, then the trees themselves can go but I'm a big fan of vegetative roofing, not necessarily because of its resilience, although it can but vegetative roofing is one of our biggest solutions on water problems. You wanna prevent water from going down a roofing drain and into the storm sewer. One of the best things to do is put four inches of soil on that roof. That'll take the first three quarters of an inch of rain and so it's a fascinating approach to it. I like it. We also do have concerns about vegetative roofs from a wildfire perspective. Because when you're in a drought condition and you can't water and then there's your fuel right on the roof. We do have standards for both wind and fire and I agree with the concerns. I think one thing to think about with vegetation is that depending on the system, we're seeing a lot of the roofing manufacturers with grid and reinforcing systems for that component but they're not intended to save the plants. You're gonna end up with some degree of plant loss on the system. For a fire risk standpoint, most of our vegetative roofs actually, there's maintenance and irrigation requirements but if you're in a drought area, it's absolutely assured that you're not gonna meet the fire code requirements. And then the third thing I think we need to look at is not only from a landscape architect standpoint of the aesthetic you're trying to achieve but what's appropriate in the climate you're in for those plants to actually survive. We have a lot of great vegetative roofs designs that are in the wrong climate zone for that set of plants. Yes sir, right here. Thank you. I'm David Hattus with IBTS and I'd like to come back to the solar question because there's another twist to it in terms of conflict between energy resilience and hurricane resilience. As you know, the latest codes require for new buildings in the hurricane zone to be built with either hurricane shutters or with impact glass and there's a whole industry that has developed to meet that. It's not a retrofit requirement so older buildings don't have to be brought up. I believe we're seeing solar installations in Texas and in Florida and other places on existing buildings and without a requirement to strengthen the windows for impact protection and what that means is that if in a hurricane the window breaks, the pressure uplift on the roof increases by about 50%. So it's resisting a 200 miles hour wind. Can we move into requiring and of course there's a lot of pressure to from various sources to put solar on roofs and on buildings. Is it possible to make them aware that there is this additional problem to require the retrofit? So I think when we think about buildings we have to think about them holistically and we don't necessarily do that in the interrelation between our design. So let's just take the building code. You actually probably could not build a fully to the every letter of the building code building ever because each group of the code actually is designing its own bubble and then the interrelation between those sections make it difficult for us to translate one to the other. What you're bringing up is actually a great point. We have glazing in a building of varying standards and we're not always required to bring that up to the current code or even look at future code. That implosion of glass changes pressurization in a building and yet it's not picked up in our roofing standards. It's not picked up in other standards within the building. It's picked up in fire spread caused by wind if there was a fire event electrical fire in the space. That interrelation is important to get it out in the industry and education format. We have to understand that in that storm event we're not designing for that. We're designing everything up to that storm event. There's nothing in our code today that actually designs properly to a storm event. And so for the solar industry and for the roofing industry, yeah, it's gonna happen, that roof's gonna be lost, but their design parameters are based on the building staying intact holistically, and that's the challenge. And even on Fortified, if you saw the video that she showed where you had the one building that wasn't built with the code and one that was and the one building blew apart, just imagine if that building was across the street. So you've got a one home that's built to fortified or resilient system, but the house across the street is not yet. That one blows up and smashes into the building across the street. Now, all those windows go on that building pressurized, the house pressurizes, you've got a new problem. And so this is a very, very difficult problem to get to. That's why part of this solution has to be sent around what the new construction codes are. So when entire neighborhoods are built, which you see a lot in the coastal regions, that all of the homes are built to that standard in that entire neighborhood. Now you're really getting at the core problem. And so it's a tough deal when you're having a mix and match type of thing. Yeah, one of the things I'm personally very grateful for is that I don't need to understand the politics of solar, which there's a lot there. And when we've done the wind testing that we've done, we've picked up a little bit of it. But as is the case with many industries, the industry needs to understand there's a problem. And that's, I don't think the wind performance of solar arrays is the major focus right now of that industry. And until there be, whether anecdotal evidence following an event where you see these problems, these are the kinds of things that begin to change minds. But I do not think minds are being changed yet with respect to the wind performance of solar arrays. Ellen, you have a question? The woman raised that point earlier about there are some technologies that integrate solar, roofing technologies that integrate solar, right? So I was thinking if you're gonna do a roofing retrofit and you wanna get a twofer, perhaps you could look at a solar shingles or something like that. So I just wanted to absolutely know that there are these other rooftop solar systems, as you say, but I did wanna just at least acknowledge that there are these other products. Come here. Yeah, there are. My concern, and I apologize for being maybe a bit too direct here. My concern is that there are none of these yet that are truly code compliant. And it becomes almost like an urban legend that these systems can keep both water out and power the home today, while simultaneously meeting all the building code, particularly related to fire, these panels burn. And I'm not even certain that at this point of the technology technological growth that we're at a place where they should even be mounted on a building yet. And there's a lot for us to learn in relationship to that. And listen, my roofing company built solar powered plants on large commercial buildings. And we spent a lot of time looking at trying to figure out how to fully integrate one. You're starting to see some technologies in Asia, particularly in China and Japan, where they're building solar panels into windows and things like that. But all of these create different problems should a catastrophic impact hit that now powerized building component that you now have exposed electricity running that's uncontrolled. And even though there's been a lot of marketing, I know Tesla's been working hard on a pure powered shingle. They don't have one that actually works yet. And so we're a long, long way away, I think, from getting to where we can have a integrated power generated roof that will be truly in alignment with the building codes in part because there's a lot of resistance from other trades and other protective services like the fire departments and police who are very, very concerned about it. Paul, your comment. So I think one other thing to think about is that the technologies are improving. We are looking at the wrong component. We have more roadways and more ground infrastructure that we could actually build into. The technologies and actually paving with solar is being used all over China. It's being used in other parts of the US in an experimental look at this and in Canada. And I think that those technologies integrate it with buildings. So if we lose all of our buildings and we still have our roadways and there's a percentage that are still damaged, the micro gridding component of an infrastructure component of solar roadways actually is an easier thing to deal with and reintegrate back into the power grid. And so I think that that technology could be looked at. Some of the hardening of those components are actually things that could be taken back to the roofing industry. So in five or 10 years, we'll probably be at a different point with this, but we need to look at this more holistically. You know, if we're not dealing with a roadway structure that could actually be part of our component, which actually a lot of the emergency groups are more comfortable with from that standpoint. We're missing the boat. Yes, sir, in the back. Could you talk about the cost up relative to hardening of buildings, fortifications? Could you repeat the question? Sure. So code built versus fortified built in the coastal region, for example, in an entire community, what's going to be the dollar cost up and how's that going to hit the mortgage industry? I can't answer how it's going to hit the mortgage industry, but it depends. There isn't an easy answer. It depends on what's your code base. And also, since a lot of it is labor, you know, what are prevailing labor costs? So Florida's got a pretty good code. It really doesn't cost that much to get up to, to fortified Alabama. I think labor costs are probably lower than they are sort of in the Northeast. So, so that's a cost effective way. What we say is that, you know, it's cost effective, certainly to get a fortified roof when you are re-roofing or roofing for the first time, $600, $800, you know, for an average size home, but no one is going to get a new roof just to go fortified. Window and door protections can be done at a relatively inexpensive level in the case of making sure that your plywood is up, you know, all the way up to getting, you know, impact resistant windows. Again, at the time of construction versus replacing out all your windows, you know, is very expensive. The continuous load path in gold is expensive. Again, you'd never retrofit to that, but at the time of construction, it's not that much. I mentioned Alabama. Alabama is the most robust market for fortified, you know, anywhere in the country. They actually put in building codes for fortified in the coastal regions. And then the builders started and the market started recognizing that. And I was down making a visit there a couple of weeks ago. You know, and I went in a neighborhood of $250,000 homes and they were all built to the fortified gold standard. So you can do it at different price points, but it has to be done at the right point and in a sort of deliberate way. But to that point, from a commercial standpoint, to your question as to the payback, so to speak, what's the investment? If you are a commercial user and you want your building to, let's say you want to be in business, when you look at some of these flooded communities, you're seeing there are in fact retailers and manufacturers who've stayed in business. There is a payback that goes beyond the immediate, you know, whether or not you feel it's worthwhile if you're in a commercial business. So that may be a different component when you're thinking about doing these retrofits to make a resilient building. Yeah, you know, from a commercial perspective, we think one of the most important things is having power generation, you know, a generator. And we were in the field following Hurricane Harvey, where it made landfall, not in Houston, and saw just countless businesses that looked okay. I mean, we didn't have the authority to go into them, but they looked okay, but they were closed because there was no power. And again, to sort of focus on the bottom line of the business is staying in business. Yes, sir. Over the side. If I might just ask a follow up to that. So for the homeowner or business owner that has a structure built to the fortified standard, is there a benefit in terms of their insurance rate being lower? We're an hour and 15 minutes and we got the first question about insurance discounts. You guys, you were slow. There is, you know, in some states in Alabama, they actually have put that into their insurance regulatory mechanism. Other states, you know, it's whatever the market determines. And, you know, insurance companies, it's a regulated industry, but it's also a competitive industry. And they are looking for fortified homes. IBHS actually is developing a database so that they can check that out and, you know, can respond accordingly in the market. I don't know what the discounts are in Alabama, but they certainly are enough to sort of keep that, that sort of program moving along, you know, in all aspects of the market. It's interesting, your question. And I agree with Derek. It took longer than I thought for the question to come up, but it's an excellent one. And you expand on that question, not just the insurance industry, the credit markets. For example, just as the three people who have said that building performance is a systemic issue. It's how do you build a systematic approach to resilience? Communities, Moody's just came out with a statement yesterday that said that cities that don't have a resilience program and are dealing with it from a building standpoint, from a, remember, and you probably guys all know this, 75, 80, 85% of all of the bridges, tunnels, et cetera, that are part of this infrastructure debate. And by the way, buildings are part of infrastructure. Let's not forget that, are owned by the municipality. What Moody's is saying, if you're not gonna take the initiative to become resilient, you're gonna pay a higher interest rate on your bond structure. So that's a very important, it's not insurance per se, but it's kind of, so it's kind of an answer to your question. Anybody, yes sir? Maybe I can, oh great, I mean I can make myself heard, but sure, this works. So my question more is on the, I guess, technological side of this process and forgive my ignorance, this is just, I'm not fully aware. Where it concerns the technology that goes into fortification, what currently exists, when we're talking about populations that would expect to see several high impact events in a calendar year, or several high impact events in several calendar years, while it was advocated by this panel that there is a return on investment for making those types of expenditures, how much so is that the case for populations who inevitably are guaranteed to see repeated events year in, year out? So in other words, maybe, and I'm a New Yorker, right? So maybe Sandy was the, actually Sandy was, the greatest environmental event I've seen in my lifetime, but I'm also Puerto Rican, and I understand that Maria was not the, is definitely by far not the first massive hurricane that the island had seen. By far the worst, again, within my lifetime, but not by far any, with any shortage of frequency and with climate changes being what they are, you would expect that these populations would begin to see more events with greater frequency. You know, it, it, that's a great question. And most of the testing that's done is done on new construction. And then the question is not so much having many high impact but day after day we actually have sort of one of the less glamorous parts of the IBHS research center is what we call our roof aging farm. And we have a lot of little sort of roofs out there picking up the weather. And we have, you know, weather measurement, you know, devices in every single one and they look at the temperature every day and they look at the, you know, the rain precipitation and so forth. And at five, 10, 15 and 20 year increments we are going to go in and we're going to test those shingles to see how do they perform compared to a new roof. There's an aging farm probably not far from you in Madison, Wisconsin, some of our member companies Cincinnati, Ohio, coastal Alabama and Kansas City. So we are testing that. I think that the place where you see that frequency the most is with respect to hail and because it doesn't take a lot of hail to result in a roof replacement even. And so we were actually developing a hail standard and asphalt shingle hail standard to try to get a better sense of that. But really one of the questions I think that people ask and we don't know the answer, you know, is, you know, it's great to have a 30 year roof. But if there's going to be hail damage, you know, every seven years or whatever, does it pay to make that investment? And I don't, I don't know how do you guys answer that? Yeah, I think it does. There's a market tension that occurs on the hail side. Then I'll talk a little bit about the wind. The market tension on the hail side is if a consumer buys a new roof for their home and they buy a roof that's impact resistant, what the industry would call class four, that'll take a hail stone up to about two inches. So it's pretty good impact. If they buy that and they have it and now eight or nine years later, you know, that roof has maybe got some mold on it, not looking all that good, but totally performing exactly the way the manufacturer was. A new hail event comes through. All their neighbors are getting brand new roofs paid for by the insurance industry. The, their adjuster comes up and says, nothing wrong with your roof. They almost view that as a negative. The consumer does. They don't mind the disruption for the most part about replacing a roof because of hail, because they can be planned and you can do it when it's not raining. People don't have to move out of their home. Wind is a totally different animal. And when you get into a post hurricane or wind event, let me just describe what fortified looks like for those. You tear that old roof off on an asphalt shingle roof. You've reattached the deck with either ring shanker screws so that that deck now stays. The plywood sheeting now stays on. You then put a water shedding underlayment there so that if the shingles would blow off, there's something that will shed the water off. This is all about water mitigation. If the roof goes, that's the cheap part of this for the homeowner and for the insurance industries. When water gets into that home, that family has to leave the house and live someplace else. Now the carpet is gonna be mold mitigation. All that's gotta be done because the water got inside. So you put in a more durable underlayment under those shingles and then you install the shingles but you increase the attachment by 40%. Instead of four nails to a shingle, you go with six. Instead of having an unadhered perimeter, you adhere the perimeters where wind can get at it. And you do things like that. So it's not horribly expensive to do. I think your $600 to $1,200 number depending on the size of the house is right. I think the insurance industry still has to do a little bit of arm wrestling about, do you include that over the garages or carports, for example, is it worth it to that consumer to do it there? But those are relatively low in cost types of fixes since the laborer is already there. So it's not a big thing. And someone asked about the home mortgage industry. They're actually very much in favor of Fortified because remember, they're the true owner of that property till the property's paid for. And they're not particularly interested in having a storm damaged property that is either underinsured or that people can't afford deductibles or what have you. I'm a big fan of it. Paul. So one thing I wanted to add is we have the upfront cost of a first time install. And if we're looking at a region where we know we're gonna have multiple events, we should have a long-term setup of cost in our revenue stream, looking at ongoing maintenance and then long-term planning for partial and full roof replacement at a frequency that we expect those major storm events. And I think that's something we don't plan for today. And we're planning for the initial install and if it's damaged, we're gonna go back with a new install. We can't predict the degree of damage we're gonna have on the buildings. So depending on the site, the location, the size of the building, the way that the glass and glazing may fail, the way that the roof may fail may be not easy to predict. If we have a broadcast out with inflation, some idea of revenue cost, at least we can look at the rate of replacement, the amount of time the building's left open and not conditioned, and the amount of damage that can be driven by mold and other things growing in it isn't well understood. So if we look at even after Katrina, a lot of the buildings that were left unoccupied were due to mold growth, rapid mold growth inside the building on drywall and other finishes. And so you have these large commercial buildings that just aren't unable to be used because the cost of remediation to remove all that and provide a clean, healthy building is too expensive. I would also add to that when we talk about the amount of debris that gets caught up in a wind-borne environment, even if we had an entire neighborhood that was built to a resilient level, you have to take a look at the landscaping design as well. Because if a tree gets airborne and it hits the home, it can become a tumbling effect as well. And so there's a lot of issues centered around this entire thing to actually have a true resilient neighborhood. Thank you very much. I just want to end, I think we're close to the end, are there any more questions at this point? By thanking the panel, I think there's been incredibly informative. I think everybody now understands the hidden and plain sight kind of beginning of our title and the critical role that buildings, resilient buildings play to our infrastructure. We'll keep that in mind as we get further down the road on the infrastructure debate. I mean, it's all systemic, it's all working together. Communities working together and buildings are a big part of that. So thanks again, I want to thank our panel.