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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
476 points spking | 1 comments | 17 Jan 25 00:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Animats ◴[17 Jan 25 04:28 UTC] No.42734092[source]▶
Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher.

It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.

The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.

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_tariky ◴[17 Jan 25 06:24 UTC] No.42734644[source]▶
In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes. Even today, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, the countries that adopted those codes have homes capable of withstanding earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale.

My main point is that if we face major natural disasters, we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

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willvarfar ◴[17 Jan 25 07:48 UTC] No.42735056[source]▶
(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)
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trinix912 ◴[17 Jan 25 08:54 UTC] No.42735414{3}[source]▶
What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
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1. grujicd ◴[17 Jan 25 12:39 UTC] No.42736905{4}[source]▶
Not really. Old concrete cannopy collapsed. It was minimally modified as part of station reconstruction by adding some glass panels, but cannopy itself and its suspension beams were not rebuilt. It's not clear at this point whether this modification was responsible for collapse, but what is clear is that old cannopy and beams were not even inspected during this renovation. That's a major blunder which lead to loss of 15 lives, and main reason for that is systematic corruption where minimal work is performed while full price is billed by private companies close to rulling party.