One could say that Judy Gibbons started prepping for her latest endeavor as a real estate agent 46 years ago today.
That’s because on April 21, 1967, a 9-year-old Gibbons huddled under the basement steps of her Barrington home with her mother, four siblings and dog while a tornado swept away their home. It was one of six significant tornadoes to strike the Chicago area that day.
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Now Gibbons, an agent at Hunter’s Fairway Sotheby’s International Realty, has partnered with a Roselle company that has spent 14 years coming up with a way to build homes that can withstand tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. She’s trying to help R-Evolution Living commercialize its technique by helping the company find investors and government grants to build a prototype and eventually build homes for consumers.
Charles Roig, a longtime architect and owner of the company, and his twin brother, Daniel, a structural engineer, started working on the idea for disaster-proof homes 14 years ago. After more than 250 pages of structural calculations, they came up with a wood truss design and a patented wind-force resistance system that Charles Roig says can withstand winds of more than 200 mph that are associated with a category EF5 tornado.
Why spend so much time on such a project, when he’s busy designing regular homes?
“Every time I saw something on television and saw tornado destruction, it just ripped my guts out,” Roig said. “I couldn’t stop this.”
Gibbons likens the job of marketing disaster-proof houses to the early days of selling environmentally friendly homes because consumers have to buy into the concept before they’re willing to pay more for the features. She thinks collectors will be among the first to gravitate toward such a house.
Roig estimates one of his houses would cost 15 to 25 percent more than a conventionally built home. Most of the designs are single-story homes and contemporary in design.
Read more at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-mre-0421-podmolik-homefront-20130419,0,1217507.column
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