IDAEXPO+ Plenary Session
Garage Doors on the Rise: From Vulnerability to Value—How Science, Policy, and Performance Are Redefining Their Role in Resilient Homes
For more than 27 years, Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH) President and CEO Leslie Chapman-Henderson and her award-winning organization have led the national effort to strengthen homes and safeguard families from disasters. In this session, Leslie joins our Nation’s disaster failure studies lead investigator, Dr. Tanya Brown-Giammanco of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to spotlight one of the most critical—and often overlooked—vulnerabilities in residential construction: the garage door.
Drawing on decades of post-disaster research, field investigations, and consumer education, the session will begin by introducing the core problem—how garage doors, as one of the largest openings in the building envelope, are frequently the first point of failure in high-wind events. Through clear, visual examples, presenters will demonstrate how garage door damage can initiate a cascading failure sequence, allowing wind and internal pressurization to escalate into roof uplift, wall collapse, and, ultimately, structural failure.
The discussion will feature key findings from collaborative research with the University of Illinois, including insights from the 2013 Moore tornado and the 2011 Joplin tornado, as well as observations from Hurricane Ike. These findings are reinforced by post-event studies following Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Michael, underscoring the direct relationship between garage door performance and overall building resilience. Building on this research and FLASH’s longstanding leadership in advancing resilience policy and consumer awareness, the presentation will explore the growing “door size dilemma”—how larger garage door openings in modern homes increase exposure to wind pressures, introducing new challenges for design, testing, labeling, and installation. This sets the stage for a deeper examination of building codes, product standards, and marketplace realities, including ordering complexities and performance verification gaps.
Attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of how science, policy, and public awareness are converging to elevate the role of garage doors in resilience—and how this shift is creating new opportunities for industry leaders, builders, and policymakers alike. The session will conclude with a clear, visual framework illustrating the full chain of resilience, demonstrating how strengthening a single component can help protect the entire home. FLASH’s nationally recognized initiatives—including Inspect2Protect.org, StrongHomesScale.org, TornadoStrong, and the Resilience Policy Resource Guide and Retrofitting Program Playbook developed in partnership with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners—serve as a foundation for this work and a roadmap for what comes next.
Join this session to explore how elevating garage door performance can protect families, strengthen homes, and unlock new opportunities across the resilience marketplace.
Leslie Chapman-Henderson
Leslie Chapman-Henderson is respected in the disaster safety movement as a leader, trusted voice, and driver of change. As the President and CEO of the nonprofit Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH), she has been strengthening homes and safeguarding families for more than 25 years. She has created consumer demand and social value for loss mitigation through several disaster preparedness programs and initiatives centered on building science.
In 2002, in partnership with the State of Florida, she created the Blueprint for Safety (BFS) program, which provided multi-hazard, beyond-code construction practices. Many of the program’s code-plus recommendations were incorporated into the International Residential Code. After the 2004 Hurricane Season, she partnered with Home Improvement guru Bob Vila to showcase building science best practices in a 13-episode series. In 2006, she led a $25 million pilot that established the $250 million My Safe Florida Home retrofitting program, inspiring the South Carolina Safe Home Program.
Since 2009, Leslie and FLASH have partnered with FEMA Building Science to provide technology transfer projects and services that promote agency engineering programs and guidance to stakeholder audiences and the public. Additional technology transfer partnerships have included the Department of Homeland Security, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Savannah River National Laboratory, and the University of Florida NHERI Experimental Facility.
She has been a visionary in finding new ways to educate the public and promote life safety, property protection, and resilience by strengthening homes from natural and man-made disasters. Between 2008 and 2015, more than 5.8 million Disney guests learned beyond-code high wind practices to protect roofs, windows, doors, garage doors, and much more through the FLASH-sponsored StormStruck: A Tale of Two Homes, an interactive, educational weather experience located in Epcot® at Walt Disney World Resort®. In 2019, she envisioned and launched No Code. No Confidence. – Inspect2Protect.org, which allows consumers to identify building codes used in their community by inputting their zip code or street address. In 2025, she and her team developed and launched “No Fuel. No Fire.TM” a new wildfire safety initiative.
Her achievements have earned her a national reputation as a consumer advocate and expert on disaster mitigation. Leaders at The White House, all levels of government, and major corporations seek her professional counsel, allowing FLASH to promote building science and positively impact business strategies, public policy, and public safety. She has promoted building science best practices in hundreds of news interviews, including television and radio appearances on AccuWeather, ABC News, CNN, FOX News, Good Morning America, HGTV, MSNBC, This New House, The Weather Channel, and more.
Her creativity, enthusiasm, and vision have led to strategic partnerships with award-winning results, such as the National Hurricane Resilience Initiative – #HurricaneStrong. This campaign, along with many others, highlights Leslie’s ability to attract national attention, which motivates homeowners to implement mitigation activities. Throughout her career, she has steadily promoted building science as the foundation for legislation, policy, and programs to protect all Americans.
During the 2023 National Hurricane Conference, Leslie was honored with the prestigious Neil Frank Award, the conference’s highest recognition, for her exceptional contributions to advancing hurricane preparedness. She made history as the first woman to receive this award. In 2025, she was named the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) Exceptional Woman in Building—a prestigious accolade that honors dynamic and trailblazing women who have made outstanding contributions to the built environment, further recognizing her leadership and impact in the field.
Tanya Brown-Giammanco
As Disaster and Failure Studies (DFS) Director, Dr. Brown-Giammanco leads a multidisciplinary staff responsible for conducting fact-finding field investigations and studies focused on: building and infrastructure failures; successful building and infrastructure performance; evacuation and emergency response systems; and disaster recovery and community resilience. These field investigations and studies can be carried out under four different statutory authorities at NIST: National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Act, National Earthquake Hazard Reduction (NEHR) Act, National Windstorm Impact Reduction (NWIR) Act, and the NIST Organic Act. The results of these field investigations are intended to inform recommendations to improve codes, standards, and practice. The DFS Director maintains collaborations across the Materials and Structural Systems Division (e.g., Community Resilience, Infrastructure Materials, Structures, and Earthquake Engineering Groups), the Engineering Laboratory (e.g., Fire Research Division, Applied Economics Office, EL Data Security and Technology Group), and other institutions to enable successful technical investigations. While the primary focus of DFS is on events that occur within the United States and its territories, NIST may conduct field reconnaissance of international events when lessons can be learned that are relevant to U.S. construction. Dr. Brown-Giammanco currently oversees NCST investigations on the effects of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, FL.
Prior to joining NIST, Dr. Brown-Giammanco served as Managing Director of Research at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), where she led teams conducting full-scale laboratory and field studies on hail, wind, rain, wildfire, and roofing related projects. She has also held a Faculty Associate appointment at Texas Tech University since 2010. Dr. Brown-Giammanco was an NSF IGERT Fellow at Texas Tech University, where she earned a PhD in Wind Science and Engineering, while studying the use of remote-sensing technologies to assess windstorm and wildfire damage. She also has a master’s degree in Water Resources Science and a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science, both from the University of Kansas. Dr. Brown-Giammanco’s research has focused on natural hazards and their effects on buildings and roofing, the development of laboratory testing methodologies, and the development of tools, metrics, and statistical relationships to quantify and explain damage states, to advocate for better building practices and materials.
Dr. Brown-Giammanco is a FEMA Vanguard Executive Crisis Leadership Fellow. She serves as a steering committee member in the development of a new ASCE standard on the estimation of wind speeds in tornadoes and chairs the EF-Scale subcommittee. Dr. Brown-Giammanco is also a member of the Standards Technical Panel for the Impact Resistance of Prepared Roof Covering Materials (UL 2218) standard, the ASTM D08 Roofing Committee, and is a career advisor for the American Meteorological Society where she also served as a member of the Severe Local Storms Scientific and Technological Activities Commission from 2018-2023. She formerly served on the Board of Directors for the Roofing Industry Committee on Weather Issues (RICOWI) from 2012-2018.