St. Francisville · West Feliciana Parish
FORTIFIED roofs in St. Francisville
St. Francisville has been called the town two miles long and two yards wide, which is a joke about the ground it is built on. The whole place runs along the crest of a loess ridge above the Mississippi, and the land falls away on both sides of the main street. There used to be a second town at the bottom of the hill. Bayou Sara was the port, and the port was where the money came from, until the Civil War, fire, flood, and the boll weevil finished it and hardly a trace was left. What survived is the town on top, and that is where St. Francisville has stayed.
Why a FORTIFIED roof matters in St. Francisville
There are not many towns in Louisiana where water is the smaller half of a storm, and this is one of them. St. Francisville sits high, well upriver, and a long way from anything the Gulf can push inland. That narrows the whole problem down to one component of the house. Wind reaches every address in this town, and wind lands on the roof. The houses along these streets are old and the trees over them are older, and once a covering lets go, the deck is the only thing left between the weather and the ceiling. A FORTIFIED roof is built for exactly that narrow a problem. The deck is re-nailed with ring-shank nails and sealed underneath the covering, the edges are detailed where wind gets its start, and the covering itself has to carry a wind rating before an evaluator will sign off. It is unusually good value in a town like this, because for most houses up here the roof is not one exposure among several. It is the exposure.
Hurricane Gustav (2008) moved inland across Louisiana, and West Feliciana was one of the parishes the federal government opened to individual disaster assistance afterward.
What a FORTIFIED roof pays back in St. Francisville
Louisiana requires every insurer writing wind coverage to discount the wind portion of the premium for a home built or retrofitted to the FORTIFIED standard. That discount is not a promotion and it is not regional: it applies in St. Francisville the same as it does on the coast, and it repeats every year the designation stays in force. The state FORTIFIED roof tax credit stacks on top, worth up to $10,000 of qualifying costs on a roof you pay for yourself.
See how the mandated discount works in the insurance savings guide, the state credit in the FORTIFIED roof tax credit guide, and what the standard actually requires in the FORTIFIED Roof guide.
The Fortify Homes grant does not reach St. Francisville
West Feliciana Parish is not currently in the Louisiana Fortify Homes grant area, so the up-to-$10,000 grant is not available to a St. Francisville address. That is worth knowing plainly rather than finding out late. The eligible-parish list changes every round, so it is worth checking the official map from time to time in case the parish is added. Check the live LDI Fortify Homes map for the current grant area.
St. Francisville is in West Feliciana Parish
For how the program reads across the whole parish, see FORTIFIED roofs in West Feliciana Parish. For every other parish and city, see FORTIFIED roofing by Louisiana parish and city.
By Louisiana Fortified HomesUpdated
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