What post-storm damage assessments say about garage doors

What the reports found

The hurricane garage door findings report what other people measured. HyreGarage inspected no building. Every finding comes from one University of Florida (ESSIE) report for the Florida Building Commission, dated May 15, 2024. It reviews federal and engineering damage reports on seven hurricanes from 2004 to 2022: Charley, Ivan, Katrina, Ike, Harvey, Michael and Ian.

Three of the seven include a photo of garage door damage with a caption: Charley in Punta Gorda (2004), Harvey in Fulton, Texas (2017), and Michael in Panama City (2018). No photo for the other four does not mean the doors held.

The clearest finding is about distance, not wind speed. After Hurricane Michael, four debris-damage sites in Panama City, one a garage door and roof, sat 3.25 to 3.39 miles from St. Andrew Bay. The ASCE 7 wind-borne debris region (the zone where codes require impact protection) reaches one mile from the water.

Damage did not need winds above the design level. Hurricane Ike’s winds (90–110 mph) stayed well below its ASCE 7-05 design range (130–150 mph). Yet the FEMA Mitigation Assessment Team (MAT) found widespread failure of walls and roofs.

Why does a garage door fail in a hurricane?

Because it is usually the biggest opening in the house, made of the lightest material, across the widest unbraced span. That is why garage doors keep showing up in hurricane reports that were not written about them.

The UF/ESSIE report states the general cause plainly: “Damage to the windward facing envelope of buildings from the impact of wind-borne debris (WBD) can result in damaging water entry and increased internal pressures that can lead to failure of the primary structural system.”

The Hurricane Harvey section ties this to a real storm. Investigators found that flying debris, “shingles, roofing materials, and siding,” “punctured walls, doors and windows, leading to internal pressurization and water infiltration” in the Rockport Northwest and Holiday Beach neighborhoods.

The IBHS field team traced the worst damage to one local cause: wind speeding up over Copano Bay before it reached those two neighborhoods. They had “the most severe total damage of the areas investigated.” Nearby Aransas Pass and Port Aransas, closer to open water, saw less, because blowing over land slowed their average winds.

HyreGarage analysis: the Copano Bay finding matters beyond Harvey, because no code map captures it. A debris zone is drawn by distance from water and a design wind speed.

Wind speeding up over one bay’s shape is a local effect no boundary line covers. This is IBHS’s finding, not ours. We repeat it because it shows up again in the Michael findings below.

Once a garage door fails and wind gets inside, the damage does not stop at the opening.

IBHS has described the pressure pushing out on the walls and up on the roof once the house stops acting as a sealed box (quoted elsewhere on this site).

The case studies below show what that looks like, storm by storm.

The line on the code map is not where the damage stops

Put Charley and Michael side by side and a pattern appears. The two storms were fourteen years and hundreds of miles apart.

In both, the report records debris damage (a garage door, in Michael’s case) beyond where the code’s debris zone reaches.

For both, it reaches the same conclusion: the line on the map is not where the damage stopped.

The report does not say this lightly. Its job was to study exactly this question for the Florida Building Commission. That is why ASCE 7-22 dropped the word “coastal” from part of the definition and extended protection rules to some inland lakes and bays.

The report’s summary is direct. It says “Hurricane Charley… caused damage recorded over three miles inland, raising questions about the adequacy of the one-mile WBDR designation.” It adds that “Hurricane Michael… caused debris impacts over three miles inland from St. Andrew Bay… reinforcing concerns about debris risks near inland bays.”

HyreGarage analysis: say your home is three miles from open water, and your local code map does not reach that far. You are not required to have an impact-rated garage door.

On this evidence, that does not prove you are safe from flying debris. This is not the same as “garage doors near the coast should be rated,” which no one disputes.

It is about where the line sits against where damage actually happened.

The same report has evidence the other way, and it deserves equal weight. Ivan and Katrina were real hurricanes that hit inhabited coast. The same kinds of teams, using the same methods, recorded no debris damage at all.

In both, winds stayed below the design level. So design levels do matter. They are just not the whole story once a storm passes them, or when distance from water is the question.

Meeting the design wind speed did not guarantee good results, and missing it did not guarantee failure

Hurricane Ike is the clearest example. Winds near Galveston ran 90–110 mph, twenty to sixty miles per hour below the 130–150 mph range ASCE 7-05 required there. By wind speed alone, Ike should have been a non-event for code-built homes.

It was not. The FEMA MAT recorded widespread failure as asphalt shingles, vinyl siding and fiber cement siding tore loose and became debris. It blamed materials not rated for hurricanes, poor installation and weak code enforcement, not a storm that beat the code.

Hurricane Harvey is the matching case. IBHS found that “all the neighborhoods investigated by the IBHS team were located within the ASCE 7-10 design wind speed zone of 140–150 mph, and none of the areas investigated experienced peak 3-second gust wind speeds higher than 140 mph.”

So the storm never beat the design level where IBHS looked.

Damage still happened, mostly in two neighborhoods where the land shape sped up the wind over water. IBHS also compared two homes 250 feet apart, one built in 1987 and one in 2006. The newer home did measurably better in the same wind, even though the storm never passed the design speed nearby.

HyreGarage analysis: read together, these cases say a design wind speed is the level a properly built, properly installed part should withstand. It does not promise that everything built to it performs the same. It does not promise that everything above it fails.

Installation quality, material choice and local wind speed-up each changed the outcome on their own. None of the seven reports looks closely enough at garage doors to say which mattered most for that one part. They show only that all three are real factors.

What we could not find, and so did not write

A garage-door failure rate. None of the seven reviews looks at garage doors as its own category. We can say three of seven show a captioned garage door photo. We cannot say what share of exposed garage doors failed, because we found no count of doors at risk.

The full FEMA MAT reports for Ike, Harvey and Michael. Each runs to hundreds of pages. We relied on the UF/ESSIE report’s citations of them.

We confirmed one fact directly on fema.gov: FEMA P-2077’s 350-structure, six-county survey for Michael. Anything else those reports say about garage doors, beyond what the UF report quotes, is not here.

The full IBHS research library. It is members-only. Everything credited to IBHS here is quoted as it appears inside the UF/ESSIE report, not retrieved from IBHS.

ASCE 7 itself. It is sold commercially, and we did not buy or read it. Every ASCE 7 reference here is quoted as it appears in the UF/ESSIE report, which says that is how it handles the standard too.

A national or state count of garage doors that failed in any of these storms. None of the reports counts garage doors. They count buildings and describe some part failures within them. A count would need the raw data behind each MAT report, which is not published for download.

One thing we chose not to do: turn these seven storms into one national rule about garage doors and hurricanes. Two of the three storms with garage door damage hit Florida and one hit Texas.

The four with none span those two states plus Mississippi. Three storms against four is no basis for a general claim, so we do not make one.