Comment by horsawlarway
20 hours ago
Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood).
The scary ones are tornados.
And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...
Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete homes.
Hurricanes throw branches. Tornados throw cars.
Tornadoes are quite a bit less common outside of North America, and especially the US. Some of that comes down to the absence of people in the places where tornadoes occur, so there's no one there to report them.
The Tornado Archive (https://tornadoarchive.com/) has a pretty well executed map to illustrate that. They report that between 2011 and 2021 (just the dates I punched in, so its possible the actual ratio is a bit different from that), the world saw ~20,000 reported tornadoes. North America reported 12,000 of them.
So its not just that Americans maybe don't know how to build tornado resistant structures. Its that the US and Canada's per-capita tornado rate is quite a bit higher than the rest of the world.
Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.
The quantity of energy in an F5 tornado is literally on the same scale as a nuclear weapon, albeit delivered more slowly. Given that context, their ability erase towns should not be that surprising. You can't engineer a practical structure capable of withstanding those kinds of forces.
There's also that, but I didn't go to the effort of investigating the rate of various strengths. I'll bet their data explorer shows that aspect of the phenomenon too.
I suspect that a major factor is that the great plains of North America are at a lower latitude than e.g. the Eurasian steppes, so 1) there are fewer people living there and 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This whole line of reasoning "Americans must be bad at house construction, look at all the destruction wrought by hurricanes/tornadoes/etc" just feels disingenuous to me. Like observing "look at how much better the British are at building volcano/earthquake proof buildings, you never hear about people losing their houses to lave in the UK!".
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> Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
The insurance companies have done research on the topic (including building giant 'labs' with a large number of fans)
* https://fortifiedhome.org/research/
and have developed standards/techniques that home builders/owners can do to fix a bunch of problems, starting with roofing:
* https://fortifiedhome.org
* https://fortifiedhome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-FORTIFIED-...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd-0yAPs6Wc
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=proGT6AtyJc
Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage. There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and violent but localized within a mile or so at most.
Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and lasted a week of damages.
Yes.
Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that occur.
Hurricanes… I mean, there are different sized hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately that we should have fewer people living there, because there’s going to be a widespread devastation there occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like what’s the bet here? The insurance company knows they’ll probably have to pay out eventually).
Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn’t nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024… and there was a $34B one… and a $79B one… who’s insuring the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.
You can build houses which are much less likely to be seriously damaged in a hurricane. Some more ambitious designs are virtually hurricane proof. You never see high rises knocked over by a hurricane, for instance. Because they are (mostly) built correctly. Otherwise downtown areas in the entire Gulf Coast, Mid-Altantic, would simply not have existed for more than a few decades.
The same goes for floods. Most of the problem with floods, is that the house frame and flooring are made of wood. And wood rots. If you live in a flood prone area, the first floor at least, should be brick or stone for just about everything. Yes its expensive. But so is is $800/month flood insurance. Or having the federal government bail you out and passing the cost on to the taxpayer
But building things correctly is more expensive, and Americans love their cheap McMansions.
Also, on an individual level there is less incentive to build correctly, because you will almost certainly not get a discount on insurance. 99% of the population is at the whim of either buying a used house, or whatever the builder's models are for new construction. Its really only possible if you are very wealthy and build your own house on your own plot.
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If you have to be inside one, pick a hurricane. But tornadoes are so much smaller. This list is like... 10-20 per year with an average of less than 1 casualty and a dozen houses damaged? That's basically zero as far as insurance and habitability go. I found a study titled "Tornadoes in Europe An Underestimated Threat" and it has an estimate of 10-50 million euros per year in total damage. That's not even 1 euro per house in Europe.
Let's not be silly here. European tornadoes are not taking apart houses to the foundations. Ripping off roofs or flipping over cars or even when trees are falling on a tourist tent and killing them in process has nothing to do with how houses are built in USA and nowadays even in UK and elsewhere.
The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it: Wealthy coastal landowners believe that the cost of home insurance should be about $2000/year. If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Tornados are almost the perfect example of an insurable hazard: Very low probability, very high damage, very widely distributed across the affected areas:
https://mrcc.purdue.edu/gismaps/cntytorn#
Click around that neat interactive map, you'll see that the tornado is typically a few miles long and a few hundred yards wide, there are a few thousand severe tornadoes scattered all over the Midwest and somewhat fewer on the east coast in the past 70 years. It's not feasible to build houses everywhere that will stand up to an F5 tornado throwing cars. But they only cause a total loss of a tiny fraction of all houses in the country, and there are relatively few choices anyone east of Texas can make that would meaningfully impact their risk.
You could price insurance premiums at the risk of a tornado times the cost of the insured assets, plus a 10% administrative fee/profit margin, and those rates would be affordable. Maybe a handful of people would choose to live in Colorado instead of a few hundred miles east in Kansas because the cost of this 'tornado insurance' was higher in Kansas, but even in Tornado Alley it wouldn't be unaffordable.
Conversely, if you look at the hurricane incidence and storm surge risk map:
https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#map=4/32/-80
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...
and population density along the gulf coast:
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#7/28.541/-88.011
It's clear that people are choosing to build houses in the narrow strip of low-lying land that's right along the coast and vulnerable to high-probability storm surges! If insurance was priced at cost of assets + administration times risk of loss, it would be really, really expensive.
> If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my home town there are houses that were built on flood plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these covered you now need to install flood barriers over the doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster etc.)
Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple new houses right next to the river that float and rise and fall on stilts when the banks burst.
I think most people would go for adapting their designs, but insurance companies would have to make that offer first since they ultimately decide which designs are insurable for which amounts.
> we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.
> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.
I talked to somebody who owned a beach house in South Carolina about 5 years ago and if he wanted flood insurance it would cost $5,000 / month.
How much was the house worth?
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The real issue is global warming causing an exponential rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).
Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.
Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all kinds of insurance.
This is mostly a probability nitpick:
Most disasters follow power laws and other fat tail which don't have the same effects in the tail as a Gaussian. If you shift 1/x^a by c, you "only" get a polynomial increase.
But also, if you shift the mean of a Gaussian, the increase isn't exponential, it's super exponential (e^(x^2) to be specific).
> Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.
Sure they can, that's why they hire statisticians. They routinely deal with insurance of much rarer events where we have much worse models than climate change. They're just banned from charging the actual rates, because it's politically unacceptable.
They exit markets due to regulations banning them from charging the true cost of risk. Large insurance companies don’t just go broke. They have re-insurance that caps their losses. It’s becoming far more difficult to get reinsurance and the premium caps make reinsurance unaffordable for the insurance company so they leave. The business model is managing the money - they don’t much care about the claim losses over the long term and taking 1 percent of rising premiums to be a manager is a solid business model.
Tornados are indeed scary. I have seen a house cut in half like a knife by one. You could see the doors ripped off the medicine cabinet on the second floor and meds still on the shelf.
But tornados are also significantly smaller. A hurricane will damage a thousand square miles while a hurricane will mess up 50. It’s not quite right but the proportions are in that ballpark.
the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings. Asian apartments towers are immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking. Can't blow the roof off a square concrete building either.
Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.
>the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings.
What do you mean by this?
You missed the next sentence.
> [...] immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking.
The 2024 hurricane season damage totaled $128.072 billion.
I couldn't find data for tornadoes in aggregate, only individual storms.
> Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much damage per year, on average, as hurricanes. Hurricanes tend to cause much more overall destruction than tornadoes because of their much larger size, longer duration and their greater variety of ways to damage property. The destructive core in hurricanes can be tens of miles across, last many hours and damage structures through storm surge and rainfall-caused flooding, as well as from wind. Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a few hundred yards in diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from their extreme winds
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/how-...