Broward County sits inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone, county wide and with no exceptions. That single fact governs most of what we do on exterior openings here, from a Las Olas storefront entrance to a beachfront condominium tower in Pompano Beach.
Working Inside the HVHZ
Exterior door and opening assemblies in Broward must carry approval rated for HVHZ use, verified against the code’s testing application standards for impact, pressure, and cyclic loading. Broward accepts a Broward or Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance, and envelope installation is subject to third party inspection. Statewide Florida Product Approval on its own is not enough here.
Broward’s design wind speeds are slightly lower than Miami-Dade’s but still among the highest in the country, and the practical consequence is the same. The product, the anchoring, and the documentation all have to hold up at permit review. We have seen owners order a door that was perfectly legal in Palm Beach and discover at inspection that it cannot be used forty minutes south.
The Coastal Condo Corridor
Broward’s beachfront strip, running from Hallandale Beach and Hollywood through Fort Lauderdale Beach, Lauderdale by the Sea, Pompano Beach, and Deerfield Beach, holds a dense band of mid rise and high rise associations built largely in the nineteen seventies and eighties. Two things follow from that.
First, a large share of those buildings are now at or past the age where a structural milestone inspection applies, and coastal proximity can pull the threshold earlier. Second, their original openings have spent four decades in salt air. Corridor and stair doors in these buildings routinely fail on frame corrosion, closers that no longer latch, and rated assemblies whose labels were painted over years ago.
Inland Broward Is a Different Building
Weston, Plantation, Sunrise, Coral Springs, Davie, Miramar, and Pembroke Pines are still HVHZ, so the product requirements do not change. What changes is the failure pattern. Away from the shoreline we see far less frame corrosion and far more ordinary wear, hardware at the end of its cycle life, closers out of adjustment, and doors that were never hung correctly. Specifying coastal grade assemblies out here is usually spending money that does not need spending, and we will tell you that.
See building recertification and milestone inspection repairs for how Broward thresholds and the state milestone requirement work together.
What We Do in Broward
Fire door inspection and the remediation that follows it, commercial door and frame repair and replacement, hardware and closers, panic and exit devices, storefront entrances, trash and linen chute doors, parking lot work, and facility maintenance for associations, hotels, shopping centers, and industrial property.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is all of Broward County in the HVHZ, or only the coast?
All of it. The High Velocity Hurricane Zone is defined county wide for Broward and Miami-Dade. An address in Weston is under the same product requirements as one on Fort Lauderdale Beach.
Can we use the same door product as our sister property in Boca Raton?
Often not. Boca Raton is in Palm Beach County, which is outside the HVHZ and works from statewide Florida Product Approval. A product approved there may not carry the approval Broward requires. This catches management companies with properties in both counties more often than anything else on this page.
Our building is from 1979. What usually fails first?
On the beach, frame bottoms. Water sits at the base of the frame and corrodes it from the inside, which is why a door that looks fine from three feet away can be unsound at the threshold. Where the corrosion is confined to the bottom few inches we cut and splice rather than replace the frame and tear up the wall.
Do you work with property managers running several Broward buildings?
Yes, and it is most of what we do here. Consistent scope and pricing across a portfolio, with billing separated per property, is usually more useful to a manager than the lowest bid on any one building.