Exposure Categories in Rural Settings

[phamENG]

As I sit here in my home office and watch a logging company clear cut the several hundred acres next to my semi-rural home - converting my house's wind exposure from B to C in the process - I'm curious: how is everyone classifying wind exposure for rural houses in the woods?

I was trained to use what's there at the time of the design, citing the idea that we can predict everything that will happen to the house or the surroundings. That feels a tad hollow now. Granted, a lot of clear cutting operations result in developments that will maintain that exposure B. Mine won't (we don't have utilities down this road and the 15 year utility extension plan doesn't include my area, and everything here is classified as wetlands now anyway so development costs are too high without higher density neighborhoods or one offs on pre-existing lots), and it seems quite plausible that many others in rural settings won't. If somebody owns a large tract of land and wants to build a house on it, sure, but I'm starting to wonder if accounting for the trees is a bad idea for smaller lots in wooded, rural settings.

(Note: I'm in the Mid-Atlantic, and a large number of our forests are pine or have a decent quantity of pine in them, so they don't lose their foliage en masse.)

Any thoughts?

 

[dauwerda]

Many of the local jurisdictions I have worked in (mainly in the Midwest) have dictated that Exposure C be used for everything. My default is C, I would have to be really sharpening my pencil to go to B, but I also don't deal with the higher hurricane speeds that you have in the coastal areas.