FORTIFIED roofs in Opelousas

Why a FORTIFIED roof matters in Opelousas

Nothing about being this far north takes a house out of the wind field. What reaches Opelousas is the outer half of a hurricane, and the outer half of a hurricane is still a night of gusts strong enough to strip a covering that has been up there twenty years. Two things make that worse in town than out on the open prairie. The first is the trees. Live oaks and water oaks shade most of the older streets, and the houses standing under them are the oldest houses in the parish. The second is what those roofs went on over. A covering nailed down decades ago went down to whatever the practice was at the time, and the practice was not a wind standard. FORTIFIED corrects that at the deck rather than at the shingle: the deck is re-nailed with ring-shank nails, sealed so water cannot pour through once the covering is gone, and detailed at the edges where wind finds its first grip. The shingles are the part you can see from the street. The deck is the part that decides whether the storm gets inside.

Hurricane Delta (2020) came ashore at Creole and turned north across the prairie, and the airport at Opelousas recorded a peak gust of 75 mph on the night of October 9.