Hurricane-proofing program to end

The state is curtailing the My Safe Florida Home program — which gives
grants and free inspections to help make pre-1993 homes hurricane-safe
— even as requests for the program’s help continue to flood the state.
The $250 million program was designed to help residents protect their
homes against hurricanes, and was supposed to offer matching grants of
up to $5,000 and free inspections through June 30. The money for those
grants ran out last May, after 39,000 inspections. The state said only
35,000 inspection slots remained out of 400,000 since the program’s
August 2006 launch. Hundreds of thousands of Florida homes built before
updated hurricane building codes went into effect in 1993 in much of
South Florida and in the late 1990s in most of the rest of the state
needed to be improved, according to one engineer.