More than a decade after Hurricane Ivan tore into Baldwin County’s coastline as a Category 3 storm, local officials say the beach communities it battered would likely weather a repeat performance far better today.
Ivan came ashore in September 2004 with wind gusts topping 120 mph and a storm surge as high as 14 feet. Beachfront homes and condominiums bore the brunt of it — many structures were destroyed outright, and two condo buildings in Orange Beach partially collapsed. In the years since, building codes along the coast have been rewritten from the ground up.
Before Ivan, structures at the water’s edge in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach only had to withstand 100 mph wind gusts. Buildings constructed today must hold up to 140 mph gusts, and Gulf Shores went further this year, adopting the 2015 International Building Code that requires new construction to withstand 160 mph gusts with sustained winds of 124 mph — benchmarks tied to a Category 3 hurricane.
“On the beachfront, most of the older wood-framed structures were taken out by Ivan, and what has been built back is like night and day,” said Lannie Smith, Orange Beach’s building official and emergency management coordinator. “I would venture to guess we would have half as much damage as we did with Ivan today, just because we’re building stronger, we’re building higher, and we’ve got a beach that’s protecting those houses a lot better.”
Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft said the storm forced a rethink of construction from the ground up. New buildings sit on higher elevations with deeper foundations and reinforced concrete, he said, and critical infrastructure such as electrical boxes and sewer hookups has been moved off the ground floor entirely, aimed at getting residents and businesses back into their properties faster after future storms.
Orange Beach has required homes and condos to withstand 140 mph winds since 2004 and layers on additional requirements beyond the standard building code, including extra window protection, sealed roof decks and water-resistant barriers beneath shingles. “They’re not just allowed to build to code anymore — they have to build to what we call Code Plus,” Smith said, adding that reduced storm debris means faster road clearance and quicker recovery for everyone.
Beach renourishment and dune construction have added another layer of protection, according to Orange Beach City Administrator Ken Grimes, who called the city’s maintained “engineered beach” a major storm buffer even as it also anchors the area’s tourism economy.
The storm also reshaped how local governments coordinate. Following Ivan and Hurricane Katrina the next year, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach adopted National Incident Management System training, giving city employees clearly defined roles during storm response rather than improvising each morning during recovery, said Gulf Shores emergency management coordinator Brandan Franklin.
Population growth adds urgency to the planning. Census figures show Gulf Shores grew roughly 60 percent between 2004 and 2014, while Orange Beach grew about 20 percent, and annual visitor counts for the two cities climbed from about 4 million in 2003 to 5.7 million in 2014 — all factors that lengthen the time needed to safely evacuate the coast before a storm arrives.