Save 75% Off Hurricane Mitigation for Your Home.
Apply Now! Limited Time Offer.

In Hurricane Ivan's aftermath, REBUILD Northwest Florida stepped up to help rebuild and restore a battered and bruised community.

Five years later, the local nonprofit organization is still lending a helping hand by fortifying homes to make them stronger to better withstand hurricane-force winds.

Officials and volunteers with REBUILD deserve high marks for surpassing its original goal of retrofitting and shuttering 3,000 homes with a $20 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Anytime a home can survive a storm intact and functional is a bonus; a home that fails in a storm and can't function as a shelter is a loss.

So every home that can be strengthened now, and stays intact during a storm, is one less problem to be dealt with after the storm, when emergency services and supplies are stressed.

It's impressive that Charles McCool, deputy program administrator for My Safe Florida Home, the equivalent statewide organization, call REBUILD "one of our flagships."

"They have done more units than any other individual program member in the state," McCool said. "Nobody else has come close to 3,000."

That's high praise for an organization that since late 2006 received the $20 million grant, has operated less reactive in rebuilding damaged homes and more proactive in fortifying homes for future storms.

It speaks to REBUILD's success that other Gulf Coast states are looking at modeling what it has been able to to rebuild, restore, and harden homes in the Pensacola area.

With hurricane season beginning on Monday, REBUILD's "mitigating" or "hardening" of homes in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties is the kind of program that will pay off in the long run - both in dollars and in reduced human suffering.

FEMA spends hundreds of millions of dollars helping communities clean up and pick up in the aftermath of natural disasters like hurricanes.

The right investments - like this one - made before the storms hit can have major impact on the cost, and length, of the post-storm cleanup.