Strong wind is an annual natural hazard in Malaysia due to the geographical location. The northeast monsoon season usually commences in early November and ends in March. During this season, steady easterly or northeasterly winds of 10 to 20 knots prevail. The strong wind events such as hurricane and storms often caused severe damage to the large number of low rise building especially at the roofing system. At end of year 2014, the series of thunderstorm hit the Northern area of Peninsular Malaysia and caused million ringgit losses. This paper is focused on the roofing system failure of the low rise houses at the rural area that constitute the great majority of the infrastructure in less affluent communities. These non-engineered structures are typically built with very little, or no technical engineering input, and are often the product of varied building traditions and cultures.

Rural houses are susceptible to roof blown off and severe damage during a windstorm event due to the lack of engineering considerations. The aim of this paper is to conduct a post windstorm evaluation on the damaged rural houses located in the northern region of Peninsula Malaysia. Several activities were involved during the post windstorm survey including site visualization, site measurement and interview. Critical aspects including types of damages, types of houses, gap height, overhang length, roof geometry, roof pitch, roof cladding and terrain category were analysed using a simple bar chart. It is anticipated that the presence of kitchen house influences the overall stability of the rural houses due to the formation of gap height.

The study on the effects wind loading to the roof cladding and purlin connection has raised a great interest among researchers. In some cases, the failure of roof cladding initiated at the overhang roof was due to the development of uplift force created by the strong wind. However, these studies are limited to the non-engineered building without considering overhang roof. This paper studies the effect of roof cladding types, overhang length and cladding thickness in term of pull through capacity of the overhang roof using simple pull through tests. The tests were conducted on two types of claddings namely, corrugated and trapezoidal roof cladding. In the case of corrugated cladding with 0.28 mm thickness, the specimen with 200 mm overhang length shows the highest pull through capacity with 1.534 kN followed by 300 mm overhang length with 1.083 kN. While, for trapezoidal cladding with 0.35 mm thickness, the 300 mm overhang length recorded the highest pull through capacity at 1.163 kN compared to 200 mm overhang length (1.068 kN). It was noted that shorter length of overhang developed stronger roof cladding to purlin connection. The most efficient connection for roof cladding to purlin connection was found to be 0.23 mm thickness of corrugated roof cladding with 200 mm overhang length.

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