House was built ‘for the big one’
Sand Palace of Mexico Beach can withstand winds of up to 400 km/h
MEXICO BEACH, FLA.— As they built their dream house last year on the shimmering sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Russell King and his nephew, Lebron Lackey, painstakingly documented every detail of the elevated construction, from the 40-foot pilings buried into the ground to the types of screws drilled into the walls. They picked gleaming paints from a palette of shore colours, chose salt-tolerant species to plant in the beach dunes and christened their creation the Sand Palace of Mexico Beach.
They also installed an outdoor security camera. Its video foot- age became the only view of their property as Hurricane Michael thundered ashore last week, the most intense storm recorded in the history of the Florida Panhandle.
The camera showed a horrifying tunnel of grey fury worsening by the hour as Lackey, a 54-year-old radiologist, stared helplessly from more than 400 miles away at the corner of his roof.
“It would buck like an airplane wing,” he said from his residence in Cleveland, Tenn. “I kept expecting to see it tear off.”
But it did not. When the New York Times published an analysis of aerial images showing a mile-long stretch of Mexico Beach where at least threequarters of the buildings were damaged, Lackey saw his sand palace still standing.
“We wanted to build it for the big one,” he said. “We just never knew we’d find the big one so fast.” King would not say how much he and Lackey spent to fortify the beachside home, which public records show has been assessed for tax purposes at a value of $400,000 (U.S.). Their architect, Charles A. Gaskin, said that building a house the way they did roughly doubles the cost per square foot, compared with ordinary building practices. Lackey said he and King, who jointly own the Mexico Beach house, didn’t even refer to the minimum wind resistance required in Bay County. They built the sand palace to withstand 400 kilometres per hour winds.