The OP is eaten by hamsters.
If wou’re wondering why the glass is taped, I suppose it is to keep the inevitable shattering of the glass stuck together, instead of individual shards flying at you.
Yup. I remember my parents doing that as part of the preparation for the two hurricanes we had. Fortunately, I never found out if it’s effective in keeping shards from doing major damage.
It’s too keep to keep the homeowner busy and make him or her feel like something useful is being done.
The tape will somewhat prevent the glass it touches from shattering into small projectiles. Kinda like having little strips of safety glass. But the glass it doesn’t adhere to will be flying fast. It is generally not recommended anymore, although Collier County, FL staill says to do it.
its to keep the glass together as one chunk.
speaking as an ex-glazier there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it - but unless you were using gaffer tape (not sure what you yanks call it - duck tape???) the glass will cut straight through the tape.
of course if you want a real solution - then i’m guessing getting laminated safety glass fitted would be better - its basically two thin sheets with a sticky sheet of see-thru plastic between them.
Perhaps you’re thinking of duct tape?
duck tape, indeed. Quack quack 
Zev Steinhardt
Actually, there is duck tape, but it is a brand of duct tape. Quite a popular brand as it happens.
yeah - that was why i went with duck tape - its the brand we tend to use here, but as i say - i’ve always known it as “gaffer tape”.
It really isn’t worth it. If your glass is simply thumped a bit by a branch, masking tape in the usual single criss-cross/“X” configuration might keep the pieces in place. If the wind is really blowing and sufficient projectiles are airborne and circulating at 110+ mph (coconuts, shingles, branches, roof tiles), you’re likely to have a fairly shattering breakage no matter what (and depending on the configuration of the building and wind directions, the initial breakage may well be followed by an explosive blowout of other windows as wind enters through the broken spot and creates localized pressure imbalances that will likely lead to failure of that window and others adjacent it).
Storm shutters (they needn’t be fancy; plywood sheets bolted into screw anchors/brackets in the concrete will work against most any storm) are a better bet – and if that sounds like a lot of work (it’s not really, once the anchors are in), consider my second reason for disliking masking tape – when the hurricane fizzles out or misses you by 200 miles (this happens maybe 4 out of 5 times you get a hurricane warning, to make up a figure), scraping masking tape (often baked on by the subtropical sun) off of 20 windows, and getting the glue off with kerosene, etc., is no hurricane party either.
Umm, you do know, right, that you’re supposed to crack by several inches the windows on the leeward side of the storm? For precisely this reason.
As for the tape, I like Revtim’s theory.
IME gaffer’s tape is different from duct tape. The duct tape I’m familiar with is sort-of “layered”. It has the adhesive, a cloth mesh, and then a metallic silver layer on top. Gaffer’s tape (or camera tape) is fine-weave cloth with adhesive. No “top layer”.
I think the “cracking the window” theory was meant to apply more to tornados and barometric pressure, wherein the theory was that the super-low pressure of the tornado needs to be equalized with the higher in-house pressure of your house to prevent bursting outward from barometric imbalances alone. I don’t know that that is still advocated, and I seriously doubt that the barometric pressure differential in a hurricane is sufficient, alone, to break any glass. The pressure imbalanace to which I referred was more an instantaneous and localized (and greater) wind pressure imbalance caused by the sudden influx of a huge amount of wind/air into a comparatively confined space, and I doubt that having a window cracked on the other side of the house would come close to bleeding off this localized pressure. Another way of looking at it is simply F=ma, and the windows, the glass shards, the unbroken portions of window adjacent the puncture (if the whole window doesn’t shatter), the air within the room, and the room contents, will all be subjected to substantial lateral and rotational accelerations as soon as the wind enters through the hole and (in a confined space) begins buffeting against the walls, forming vortices, etc.
The “leeward side” of a hurricane is not an entirely meaningless concept (I would suspect though don’t know that a mean direction vector for the local wind velocity during the storm would point closer to the lateral direction of transit of the storm eye than away from that path), but both the rotational nature of tropical cyclones, and the localized induced turbulence, especially in enclosed spaces, makes it a little optimistic to assume you can say that window X will only be encountering wind stress from direction Y through the duration of the storm.
In other words, no, you didn’t know.
Well, I grew up in Dade country and went through this drill several times as a child. Cracking the windows was as much a part of the drill as the tape. And, right, obviously the wind doesn’t maintain a constant vector for the duration. (Ooh, lots of big words. I’m impressed. Really, I am. BTW, Ace, f=ma has no application to a fluid dynamics problem.) You adjust the windows. In fact, during the eye, you can adjust before the wind picks up again, cuz you know it’s going to come from the other side.
Texas Tech’s Wind Science and Engineering Research Center disagrees with you, PBear, as do the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Energizer.com’s Learning Center, and this Florida newspaper columnist.
So, like the tape, open-a-window has since been withdrawn? Of course, the last link confirms my recollection that that’s what we used to be told to do.
I’m not sure if Dade country is anywhere near Dade (now Miami-Dade County). If it is, the precision-choreographed drill of running from one side of the house to the other to equalize the pressure that you performed “several times” would have had meaningful outcomes only if this was taking place during the period before 1965 (Betsy), or when Andrew hit in 1992 – because in the '70s and '80s there were not, as far as I know, any direct hits of Category 3 or higher storms in Dade (note that I made reference to 110 mph winds, which is the cutoff for top of Category 2/bottom of Category 3, and considered the dividing line for “major storms” (see http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/index.html, fn 1)).
Whether the drill as you described it existed, or took place at your house, or was advocated by some putative authority, was not really the dispute. The question is whether the drill was worth it. If you said that you’d experienced several direct hits on windows, which were saved from breaking/shattering by taping or by opening opposite-side windows, it would be an interesting counterpoint to my point, and I’d like to hear that anecdotal evidence.
“BTW, Ace, f=ma has no application to a fluid dynamics problem.”
My possibly-fallible recollection of what I actually wrote (if only there were a way to check it!) was that “the windows, the glass shards, the unbroken portions of window adjacent the puncture (if the whole window doesn’t shatter) . . . and the room contents” will be subjected to acceleration (and hence that their behavior, and the force they exert upon whatever static object they hit, will be discernible by F=ma). As currently understood, windows, glass shards, and room contents and the like are not fluids.
As for the fluid actually involved here, air, I’m not sure that F=ma (which I introduced with the preface “another way of looking at it,” which some might reasonably read as indicating an analogy) has “no application” to fluid dynamics. Air=fluid comprising gas molecules=free flowing agglomeration of discrete objects, each presumably possessing a mass. It requires force to accelerate these objects. When they are ‘decelerated’ from an accelerated speed, they will exert a force, at a local level at least, upon the decelerating impediment proportional to their mass and the rapidity of their deceleration. And then your window breaks. If you disagree with my analogy, I’ll listen to an alternative one.
But you did make an assertion as to why windows were supposed to be cracked. My recollection that it was for hurricanes has been confirmed.
And, yes, I was there for Betsy. Cleo too.
We’re both right that people have recommended this drill over the years for tornados <and> hurricanes (see, e.g., http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/police/tornado.htm), and both being right is a happy outcome. And we can probably agree nothing short of shutters will do much once debris starts flying toward your window at 110 mph.
Hurricane cycles are strange. With Betsy and Cleo you caught the tail end of what seems to have been high-activity times from '40s-'60s for S. Fla. Then, for 20 yrs., false alarms. If you read an account of Spanish explorers or the like, they seem to run into monster storms every 3 weeks (admittedly, they were drifting around so perhaps more likely to encounter a range of weather conditions). No word on what methods they used to safeguard their windows, but it ended up being a moot point for many I suppose.
Agreed. And a lot less than 110, for that matter. Even a whole gale (55) is no joke. Storm shutters in those days were typically metal awnings that could be folded down. But only the ‘ritzy’ houses, as a rule, had them. And there was only so much plywood to go around when the crisis came.
BTW, looking back over the discussion, you seem to assume ‘the drill’ was complicated or nuanced. Nah. A hurricane is, of course, an organized storm system. It was pretty easy to tell which way the wind was blowing, gusts and eddies notwithstanding. Finding one side of a four-sided house that’s mostly in the lee ain’t that hard. Only changed the cracked windows once or twice over the course of the storm, IIRC. Simple, really.