Can Hurricane Winds cause a Crack in a Tile Floor?

QUESTION

I have about a ten foot crack in my tiles that showed up in the middle of my house (not near any edges of the home) the day after hurricane Matthew. Only one corner of one tile (18 by 18) sounds hollow. The claims adjuster said he had never seen anything like it and it was settlement. Can hurricane force winds cause a crack in the middle of a home?

ANSWER

ANSWER - When there is failure in a tile installation it is generally not due to one condition or deficiency, but rather due to several compounding deficiencies.

There are a number of different reasons of what causes a ceramic tile to crack.   There could be an underlying crack in the concrete substrate below the tile that telegraphs up through the tile.   The crack may not appear until the substrate starts to move for some reason.

Tiles can crack if they expand from being subjected to excessive moisture or heat and there are no movement joints to mitigate the movement and resultant stress.

Tiles can crack if they are not properly supported under the tile and then are subjected to some type of live load over the unsupported areas.

There may have been a pre-existing crack in the concrete that started moving when the concrete was subjected to moisture.  The exterior walls can move from wind loads that could then exert stress on the tile assembly if the tile is butted up to the walls.

For a tile to crack it has to be subjected to some force to cause the stress.   Tiles don't crack by themselves.

The only way to determine what has caused the cracking in the tile is to perform an intrusive inspection of the tile floor in the area where it is cracked and in areas where it is not cracked.   It can be determined if the cracking recently occurred or if it was pre-existing.

 

12 thoughts on “Can Hurricane Winds cause a Crack in a Tile Floor?

  1. Gregory Tiffany says:

    My tile floors are cracked now ONLY after the hurricane. Ins. company is having one of their structural engineers inspect floor. I can only imagine what he will say …being paid by my ins company.

    • Marina says:

      Hello Gregory, I have the same situation with my marble floor. It cracked during Irma across entire living room. Please share if you have any update on your insurance claim. You mentioned structural engineer inspecting it.. what were engineer’s findings? Thanks and good luck on your case!

  2. Donato Pompo says:

    There are good knowledgeable and honest inspectors and there are bad ones.

    We do inspections both for home owners and insurance companies. The insurance companies we work with just want to know the truth and are willing to pay for reasonable remediation. Unfortunately there are claimants who try to take advantage of insurance companies to try to get compensated for either pre-existing damages or for alleged damages that don’t exist.

    Sometimes insurance companies unknowingly hire inspectors that are not qualified and they can make conclusions that are not valid. So as the home owner you have to do your homework and verify that the findings are reasonable.

  3. Diane says:

    I have brick paver veneer floors in my kitchen and bedroom. After the hurricane we didn’t have power (Louisiana) for almost 10 days and my hard wood floor buckled and also the storm flooded the garage and crawl space. crawl space. My wood floors bucked and cupped. Later – couple of months later I started getting a lot of cracks on my kitchen floor. Would this be from the floor moisture from not having ac – expanding and contracting ? My wood floors are terrible but yet my insurance company wants to send an engineer for my brick floor. Could or would power kiss with standing water in the crawl space for over a week damage the floor ? I’d appreciate your opinion.

    • Donato Pompo says:

      Insurance companies normally are looking for evidence of whether the floor had resultant damages from the hurricane event. It doesn’t matter whether the brick was installed incorrectly or not. What matters is that it is not pre-existing damage that was not resultant damages from the hurricane event.

      Brick and a cementitious substrate are not normally affected by water. Although if there was a wood substrate under the brick and it got wet and expanded and contracted when it dried that caused the wood to warp then it is possible that would cause resultant damages to the brick. There are ways for experts like CTaSC to determine if the damages are pre-existing or not.

      • Diane says:

        Thank you for your reply. I finally got a call from the engineering company (6 weeks later). I asked the girl who called why they have this assignment and she said the Adjuster doesn’t believe my floor damage (wood AND brick) is from the storm. I feel like I’m on crazy pills. Wouldn’t before and after pictures suffice for this?

        There is a wood subfloor under the floors. I have a crawl space that is about 3 -4 feet high. It is dark and snakey and I avoid going in there as much as possible ! But what I personally think happened – my layman opinion, is that the wind blew a lot of insulation down, and the wind and rain hit the insulation and it gradually got the subfloor wet. I had about a foot of standing water under the house (not as high as the insulation was hanging down) and no power for 10 days – and I think in time the subfloor got wet and then the problems started – it took a little while for it to really start to show. We really had it bad here – neighbors in back of me and on the side of me had huge trees uprooted and everyone was riding in boats because nobody could leave for a few days.

        Anyway..I just don’t have a great feeling about this visit from the Engineer since the Adjuster has seemingly already made up his mind without even having seen my house – I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle (I’m losing sleep- it is 3 am- why am I searching these things in the middle of the night?). To give you the scale of my worry – I bought this house and moved in a week before the hurricane. I am a single parent of two teenagers and have one income – This is a huge expense to have to redo wood floors and brick floors in my whole house. (I had plenty of other damage too and it has been a stressful ordeal just trying to get people people here to make repairs.)

        Do you have any rebuttal I may give if the insurance company says:
        1-poor installation
        2-pre existing
        3-vaguess words like “moisture”
        (I need some verbiage !)

        My house was built in 1993 and is not in new pristine condition but it’s nice and I wouldn’t have bought it with floors like this (**and nobody would buy it now). There were some very small hairline cracks in my brick floor (a couple – very tiny) but nothing of any concern to my home inspector, the appraiser, or myself just prior to buying it.
        It is literally a brick floor and it looked normal. Now it is 10x worse and cracking in every direction with actual loose pieces. some of the cracks are getting wider and dark with little pieces missing in the brick. We are almost one year post hurricane now. My wood floors have buckling and cupping throughout (still) and where they did go down somewhat there are gaps between the boards- it is not nice.
        I’ve never been through this before and don’t understand how they can deny a claim for something supposedly pre existing or faulty if they agreed to insure the house and opted not to inspect it first? I know the brick floors were here at least since 2015 and it can’t be a coincidence they all go to he#@ immediately after I moved in – we had a CAT 4 hurricane days after I moved in – that could be it.

        Mr. Pompo, are you coming to Louisiana for a tile conference ? Hurricane conference? Are you longing for some boudin or crawfish étouffée ? Gumbo? Shrimp Po Boy? I’ll can have it all ready if you’d like to come and see what is happening over here. 🙂

        Knowing what you know – any advice you can provide me would be great. Sorry for the novel. Thank you for listening.

        • Donato Pompo says:

          The insurance company is suppose to cover any resultant damages from the event. Qualified and Honest experts can forensically verify whether the damages are pre-existing or resultant damages.

          CTaSC just performed two inspections in Louisiana few months ago. It would probably cost about $15,000.00 for an inspection and report, more or less….

          You should hire a Public Adjuster how specializes in advocating for home owners on insurance claims. They work on commission and know how best to deal with insurance companies.

  4. Ken says:

    Hi Folks. Interesting information here. I have a situation where floor tiles have become loose and/or sound hollow since Hurricane Ian. There were also a few tiles that were dislodged (“tented”). It initially appeared to be isolated areas so I did some quick fixes by injecting floor adhesive under the tile via drilling into the grout line. However, additional areas of tiles are becoming loose. I’d appreciate any ideas as to why this is happening. Thanks!

    • Donato Pompo says:

      Tented tile situations are normally primarily due to not installing movement joints particularly at the perimeter of the rooms adjacent to restraining surfaces such as walls, as well as not installing them every 20 to 25 feet within the tile areas. Contributing to the problem could be that the ceramic tile is a porous non-vitreous tile that has a greater propensity to expand when subjected to moisture or temperature fluctuations. As the tile expands if it doesn’t have movement joints to mitigate that stress and strain, then the tile can debond and lift up. Contributing to that condition could be that the tile wasn’t bonded as well as it could have been to restrain that stress and strain.

      Once the tile tents up it reliefs some of that pent up stress at least in that general area. The other tiles may have already been compromised from those conditions and eventually they may have a tendency to become loose. Or those tiles had been subjected to those stress and have finally released.

      Injecting epoxy or latex under hollow sounding tiles generally doesn’t work because depending on the configuration of the thinset mortar beneath the tile the flow of the liquid can be greatly restricted. I have seen one case where it worked well, but that was because the liquid was able to reach the voids. Plus it doesn’t relieve the stress, it just provides some additional attachment to hopefully help resist the stress and strain. Of course the fact that you can inject liquid under the tile indicates the tile was installed with excessive voids.

      So rather than treat the symptom of the problem, you need to fix the problem. The first thing to do is make sure you have movement joints at the perimeters and within the field of tile filled with an ASTM C920 sealant or at perimeters you can just leave it as an open joint and put a base over it to cover it up.

      • Ken says:

        Hello and thanks for your response. The loose tiles do seem to be mostly around the perimeter and doorways. I can’t tell if movement joints are present. While fixing 2-3 tiles near a bedroom doorway, the adjoining 2 rows of tile popped loose as I was injecting the floor adhesive. Maybe that’s an indication that movement joints were not installed?

  5. jen says:

    My lanai is on 3rd fl and faces Gulf coast of FMB. After Hurricane IAN, 155 MPH wind driven rain, my lanai tile is loose and hollow and a lot of water entered my condo. Can the Hurricane cause this damage? jen

    • Donato Pompo says:

      If the tile installation was installed correctly, then it should not be compromised in terms of performance. Although if the tile wasn’t installed correctly by having movement joints and being properly bonded and if the tile is a non-vitreous type of tile then a Hurricane could cause resultant damages to the floor tile. Also if the tiles were subjected to Category 3 water that is unsanitary that could be absorbed into a porous tile and substrate that could be considered resultant damages to the tile floor.

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