What To Do About Broken Glass in New Smyrna Beach

This is the common case here and it is worth planning for before it happens. A broken opening at an empty unit is a weather problem, a security problem and a liability problem at once, and every hour of it is on the clock.

Work out in advance who can physically let someone in — a neighbor, a property manager, a cleaner — and have that name and number somewhere you can reach from out of state. Ask any company you call whether they can secure an opening without the owner present and what they need in order to do that. And get photographs from whoever is there first, because you will want them for the claim and for the guest conversation, and nobody takes them once the cleanup has started.

Whatever goes over the hole tonight is weather protection with a short life, and there are two ways it gets done. Plywood driven into the frame is fast and cheap and leaves a row of fixings in a frame you may well be keeping. Clear polycarbonate or a battened film costs more, keeps the room lit, and treats the frame as something with a future.

There is a third factor here that does not apply to somebody's own house: a sheet of plywood across the front of a beach rental is a photograph. Guests take it, and it goes wherever photographs go. If the unit is occupied or about to be, ask what the clear option costs before somebody makes that decision for you with a nail gun.

Where the break is a door, a patio slider or a shower enclosure, what goes back is governed by a federal safety standard — and in a unit that has been refitted in pieces over decades, what was there before is not proof of anything. The pane is coming out regardless. That makes this the cheapest moment you will ever have to find out what is actually in that opening and fix it if the answer is wrong.

There is a federal rule for glass in the openings people walk through — 16 CFR Part 1201 — covering doors, storm and combination doors, sliding patio doors, and bathtub and shower enclosures. It exists because of one accident: somebody walking into glass they did not see.

Read that back and think about who is in a beach rental. Every few days a fresh set of people who have never been in the building, finding the bathroom in the dark, carrying things, working out which panel of the slider actually opens. The standard was written for exactly that person, and a rental concentrates them.

Compliant glazing is marked permanently — sandblasted, acid-etched, hot-stamped, or a tag built to destroy itself rather than peel off. Which means you can audit a property in ten minutes without calling anybody: bottom corner of every shower panel and every door pane. In a unit renovated in pieces over four decades, the honest answer is usually that nobody has ever looked.

Written August 2026. General background on safety glazing requirements and temporary protection of a damaged opening — not a code ruling, not a permit decision, and not advice about one building. Wind maps get redrawn and code editions change, and on the island the answer can differ between two properties on the same street.

Get the requirement for your address from the building department with jurisdiction over it, and run any contractor's license through the state search yourself. Both links are on this page. If the property is in an association, its rules sit on top of all of this and are not optional either.