Is Your Garage Door Ready for Hurricane Season? A Mobile Homeowner's Checklist

Ask a structural engineer what fails first on a house in a hurricane and you'll get a surprising answer: the garage door.

It's the biggest opening in the structure and the most flexible. When wind pressure pushes a door out of its tracks, the storm gets inside the house — and a pressurized house loses its roof. FEMA and coastal building codes have documented this failure pattern for decades. It's why coastal Alabama requires wind-rated garage doors on new construction.

If you live in Mobile or Baldwin County, here's how to check yours before the season peaks.

1. Find out if your door is rated

Open the garage and look at the inside face of the door panels. A wind-rated door has a manufacturer label listing its design pressure or wind speed rating. Check the end panels and the section near the bottom.

• Label present: note the rating and keep a photo — useful for insurance.
• No label: assume the door is not rated. Most doors installed before the mid-2000s aren't.

2. Know your home's age

Coastal Alabama tightened wind codes significantly after the hurricanes of 2004–2005, and those codes proved themselves when Hurricane Sally sat over this area in 2020 — newer construction fared dramatically better.

• Built after ~2006 in a coastal county: your original door is probably rated.
• Built before then, or door replaced cheaply since: get it checked.

3. Look for the weak points on any door

Even a rated door only performs if its supporting parts are sound. Five-minute visual check:

• Track brackets: every bracket tight to the jamb, no missing lag screws
• Hinges: no cracks, no elongated screw holes
• Rollers: seated in the track, not worn to a nub
• Struts: horizontal reinforcement bars across the inside of wide doors — if your 16-foot door has none, that's a cheap upgrade worth making
• Bottom seal: intact rubber keeps driven rain out

4. Don't count on the opener to hold the door

A garage door opener is not a lock and not a brace. In storm winds, the trolley connection is irrelevant to whether the door stays in its tracks. If a storm is coming and you're evacuating, manually lock the door with its slide locks (or engage the opener's lock feature if it has one) — and never brace a door with your car parked against it.

5. Decide before June, not during a watch

The worst time to buy a wind-rated door is the week a storm has a name. Lead times stretch, installers book out, and choices shrink. The smart window on the Gulf Coast is winter through spring — order in the off-season and it's installed long before the first cone shows up on the news.

Bonus: many Alabama coastal insurers offer wind-mitigation credits for rated doors with documentation. The door can offset part of its own cost every year on your premium. Ask your carrier.

The bottom line

Check for the label. Tighten what's loose. If the door isn't rated and your house is anywhere near the coast, price the upgrade now — it's the single most cost-effective structural storm improvement most Gulf Coast homes can make.

Want a straight answer on your door? We do wind-rating checks as part of any service visit, and we install rated doors across Mobile and Baldwin County. See our hurricane-rated door services or request a free quote.