The Florida Panhandle was just left devastate by Hurricane Michael. The category 4 storm made landfall at Mexico Beach, destroying every home in the area. Except for one.

After the hurricane, only one house in Mexico Beach was left standing. This house was the vacation home of Dr. Lebron Lackey and his uncle Russell King, and they built the home just last year. Now, they are revealing the secret behind why their house, which they call Sand Palace, was able to survive the storm.

“We built it to survive the big one," Lackey said. “At every point, from pilings to the roof and everything in between, when it came time to make a decision about what level of material or what to use, we didn’t pay attention to code.”

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“We went above and beyond code, and we asked the question: ‘What would survive the big one?’ And we consistently tried to build it for that," he added.

They built the house to withstand winds of up to 250 mph and, and it has 40-foot pilings buried into the ground and extra elevation in the event of storm surge. Additional support is provided by 1-foot concrete walls and steel cables, which keep the roof intact.

“Hurricanes happen and so we intended to build it to survive… we didn’t pay attention to codes so much as survive-ability," Lackey said.

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Lackey was at his house in Tennessee when the storm hit, and he watched it all from surveillance cameras he had installed at his Florida house. The cameras were able to survive the storm, and he could only see the corner of the roof because of the angle that the cameras were set up.

“I was watching the corner of the roof buck like an airplane wing," Lackey explained. "I was watching the air pass by with debris in it about the speed of which you’d expect to see in an airplane.”

Even Lackey was surprised when he watched aerial footage after the storm and saw that his home was the only one still standing.

Find out more about this amazing story in the video below!

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