Severe windstorms are growing in frequency and magnitude of loss. Major damaging tornadoes struck Ottawa/Gatineau
in September 2018 and in Barrie in July 2021, resulting in $344 million and $107 million in insured loss respectively.
The May 2022 Canadian derecho in southern Ontario and Quebec cost an estimated $875 million in insured losses.
Out of 139 recorded insurance catastrophe events between 2009 and 2022, 111 (80%) had a wind loss component.

We can design new woodframe houses to resist high winds, but what are the costs and benefits? This work considers key vertical load path enhancements to resist wind uplift prescribed in Canadian standard CSA S520:22 that exceed requirements of the 2020 National Building Code. It presents a probabilistic, performance-based wind engineering analytical method that treats wind speed and component fragility as uncertain, and geometry, mass, and repair cost as deterministic.