The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
Same for eg. gas explosions, this is one one looks like in us:
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/23081219122...
And this is one over here:
https://www.prlekija-on.net/uploaded/2018_11/eksplozija-plin...
Same for eg floods, pump the basements and ground levels, repaint, move stuff back in. Someone from US I work with on a project had a pipe burst while on vacation, and insurance wrote off their whole house, because of a few days of water.
I mean, sure, you could that, but looking at the photos from fire-affected areas, nobody did that, it's all burnt to the ground.
That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed. They are pre-fabbed timber frames with a brick facade. It's quite common for British people to be snobby about building materials. I wonder how many don't realise their house is timber framed.
Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn.
This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
This claim struck me as unlikely, so I did a quick fact check.
Accroding to the most recent report I could find[1]: "Figures from the National House Building (NHBC) suggest that timber frame market share has developed from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2021 and that market conditions, as described above, present the opportunity for this to develop to circa 27% by the end of the forecast period (2025)"
This appears to be driven by Scotland where 92% of new builds were timber framed in 2019, while in England (where the majority of new houses are built) it was just 9%.
[1] https://members.structuraltimber.co.uk/assets/library/stamar...
It's not a big leap to go from complaining about the furniture and the walls being made from what seems like highly compressed dust to also complaining that underneath it all is a bunch of sticks.
It so often feels like a house of cards.
Europeans are jealous that they clearcut all their forests 1000 years ago and want to brag up their cinderblock homes that no one can actually afford to buy anymore. 40% down on their 50 year mortgages yadda yadda.
Insulation plays into combustability as well, where mineral / rock wool has thermal mass, does not ignite, but us construction has recently favored fiberglass and cellulose for the the costs.
I am thankful to live in a county where land and building ownership are more available to the common man than most and many people can escape being perpetual renters. Wood construction enables that. Plus North Americans love to adjust and remodel their homes and have unique shapes with high ceilings etc etc etc which is really helped with our construction techniques. The only thing I hate is termite risk and that could probably be resolved by allowing framing with pressure treated wood
There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.
If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.
I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.
The availability of engineered wood products like plywood is a big part of it too. Being able to attach what's effectively a solid sheet of wood to a wall adds a ton of shearing strength, for example. (And that's without getting into fancy modern engineered wood products like parallel-strand lumber or glulam, which give you something even better than raw wood.)
It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire, structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare, almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to last.
https://www.metropolitan.si/kronika/tovornjak-trcil-v-hiso-s... <- a truck hit a building, and old one, and you can see the damage... one wall. The girl in the room survived.
I mean... again.. you could build a home that is "fire resistant", and we do, but most americans don't, as we see in LA.
I don't think the US has enough seismic activity to be much different. Chile and Japan do fine with solid construction and periodic 6-8 Richter earthquakes. California is allegedly a seismic state within the USA and it rarely sees a 4 degree one, and when it happens it makes it to the US national news (and sometimes even to the news back home, but as a comedy break because people don't even think about getting out of bed if it's not a 6).
I'm not sure about hurricanes, but maintenance can't be much different as rotten wood and moldy bricks are both a problem. Maybe insulating bricks is more expensive?
> This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Cultural differences don't help here, in the US people think about rebuilding homes way more often than people in Europe, so there's this mindset that the home doesn't need to last that long because it will be rebuilt anyways. This shorter life span, "freedom" and profits thanks to lower costs also call for little regulation that forces the building code to aim to survive the regional disasters from the past 60+ years. California's fire code is probably an outlier, but SF had to burn down for the regulation to come out.
The entire western third of the US is has several M7+ earthquakes per century, with a M6 every couple years, and the occasional M8-9+. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake was stronger (M9.2) than the 2011 Japanese earthquake that caused the great tsunami.
In the eastern US, there is a giant seismic zone that had multiple M8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. These were so powerful they changed the path of the mighty Mississippi River. People forget about it because it hasn’t had a large earthquake in over a century.
A lot of R&D is done on new construction techniques for extreme earthquake risks. The challenge with reinforced concrete is the absurd amount of reinforcement and steel you need to make it survive an earthquake that strong, which makes construction slow and expensive. The state-of-the-art doesn’t use reinforced concrete at all, even in skyscrapers; they use specially designed welded steel plates and fill the empty spaces with poured concrete.
The US has an anomalously high exposure to natural disasters as an accident of geography. For example, people often forget just how many active volcanoes there are in the US, including multiple super-volcanoes. While I live in an area well-known for its M9+ earthquake and tsunami risk, I can see three active volcanoes from my kitchen window.
