Though the company was a much smaller entity back in the 90s, PGT Innovations (known as PGT Industries, at the time) provided valuable support after a thread of bad storms—bringing hurricane relief supplies to impacted areas, sharing engineering insight about why homes fail during hurricanes, and offering forward-thinking solutions to protect against those failures. After Hurricane Andrew demolished much of Homestead, FL and the southeast coast of Florida in ‘92, the community acknowledged that repeated Category 4 and 5 storms were destroying entire neighborhoods, breaking windows and doors, driving water and debris into houses, blowing roofs off of homes, and causing devastating failures. “We were seeing all that time and time again,” says Dave McCutcheon, Sr. VP of Business Integration, who served as VP of Engineering back in the ‘90’s. Miami-Dade thought they had the strongest building code in the country. “They probably did,” says McCutcheon. But after Andrew hit, the city officials recognized that the code was not nearly strong enough, and not enforced well enough. PGT partnered with a team of government of officials and a few other manufacturing companies to draft the rewrite of codes “we live and build by today,” says McCutcheon. As part of this recruited team, PGT traveled to Miami-Dade every single week to meet and discuss the elements of a new set of codes—one that would require “opening protection”. “Once Miami-Dade did it, the whole state of Florida started falling in line,” McCutcheon says. “By the early 2000s, all parts of Florida had come up to speed and started adopting those codes—though there are still none quite as stringent as Miami-Dade’s. 

Today, PGT Innovations continues to stay at the forefront of product development, looking for opportunities to further improve, “whether the code asks for it or not,” says President and CEO Jeff Jackson, “because we have to continue to evolve as storms continue to get stronger. Our company is headquartered in Florida. We care about storms. But moreover, we care about the people who have to weather those storms.” 

Read More about PGT Innovations HERE