GRAPHIC:
After Hurricane Ivan struck the Florida Panhandle in 2004, a non-profit group launched a unique program.

GRAPHIC:
The program has made thousands of individual family homes more resistant to future hurricanes.

(nats of drilling, work being done)

(NAT)

HOMEOWNER MARTZ
(00:02) My name's Robert Martz and were having our home retrofitted it's a real great program they change your garage door if need be and harden it and your entrance door tie the roof down. 

CONTRACTOR
(00:18) Garage doors blow in. If the wind comes in that it can blow the roof off from the inside. That's why we do the hurricane straps to keep the roof down in a heavy wind.

SANDI
(00:28) Our goal is to harden this house so it can sustain a category 3 hurricane. Um, and what we do in our mitigation program is harden the entire envelope of the house. I am Sandra Woodbery with rebuild northwest Florida I am the executive director and what I do is I oversee the mitigation program. Ivan was a storm unlike any other storm that we had in Pensacola it did major damage to the area.

HOMEOWNER MARTZ
(1:01) it was almost everywhere you looked it was blue tarps for roofs and people standing looking like they didn???t know what they wanted to do next cause they had no place to go.

SANDI
(1:10) Immediately we started talking about what are ways we can prevent this kind of destruction in the future and overwhelmingly we were recommended to looking at a residential mitigation program. We created a program that hadn't been done before. We managed to complete over 3,000 homes and hardening homes individual residences and we have fully retrofitted that home to maximize the hardening.

IVES
(1:42) when you look across the country Gulf Coast to have that amount of homes in one particular area hardened and retrofitted is truly exceptional.

SANDI
(1:50) we would not have had the program we have today without the federal funding FEMA has provided our community with 75% of the cost of doing the work.

HOMEOWNER MARTZ
(2:07) it was a blessing that we have this program in the area and more people should take advantage of it.

CHARLIE SHINKLE
(2:15) They not only learned a lesson, they saw an opportunity to make things stronger for the next time, they took advantage of it. They're gonna be much more ready the next time around.

SANDI
(2:27) I do believe with the hardening that we've done in this community, they'll at least be able to return to their home and the repairs will definitely be lessened to what we saw after Ivan.

Greg Bricking/CONTRACTOR
(2:45) The stronger the better is what we try to do so that's what we did.

GRAPHIC:
FloridaDisaster.org
FEMA.gov