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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.719s | source
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Animats ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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Panzer04 ◴[] No.42734751[source]
Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later?

This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.

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Almondsetat ◴[] No.42735305[source]
How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
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ZeroGravitas ◴[] No.42735542[source]
Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
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1. Almondsetat ◴[] No.42737260[source]
This is not a good analogy.

Crumple zones in cars exist under the assumption that they will not be occupied by humans. In a house, on the other hand, any place could have a person inside of it during an earthquake, meaning that basically the entire house would need to stand to avoid any human being hurt.

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2. ZeroGravitas ◴[] No.42737379[source]
I'm not an architect and don't live in an earthquake zone, but I was under the impression that wooden homes flex in earthquakes and if and when they do fall on you, do less damage than concrete homes which are stiff up until a point and then crack and fall.

So the human surviving may come at the cost of more houses collapsing.

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3. wiredfool ◴[] No.42737743[source]
It absolutely happens in steel and concrete construction in earthquake loading, when loading past the smaller earthquakes.

Plastic/non-linear deformation is intended in shear panels of steel connections and the core of well confined concrete beams/columns. The idea is to provide a lot of energy damping due to the nonlinear nature of the f*D hysteresis curve. This works long enough for the earthquake to go away and the people to get out of the building, at which point, you need a new building but hopefully no one has died.

4. onlypassingthru ◴[] No.42742038[source]
Can personally confirm. Wooden houses do flex and often survive unscathed. The only major damage is usually due to any masonry attached to the house (see: chimney) or the house moving off of the foundation (see: before ties were in the building code).