Comment by bee_rider
1 day ago
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.
Tokyo and much of Japan have huge expensive drainage systems to prevent their cities from flooding during the storms they have. China is in the same region and doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, so you’ll still see cities like Wuhan flood every few years. It’s a good bet that China will eventually invest in these systems like Japan has, as it matches their development model fairly well.
I’m not sure how Florida or Louisiana would deal with flooding though, they simply have nowhere for the water to go. They would have to basically pump and store it above ground somehow. It might make sense to re-level their cities with an artificial ground level a few stories above sea level.
The most impressive aspect of the Tokyo system is not the size (largest in the world), but the willingness to spend money on it. From start to finish it took less than 15 years. Chicago’s system, just as ambitious in size, is still going despite construction starting in the mid 1970s. Although to be fair, it is “complete” and operating but with reduced holding capacity: they are waiting for a handful of stone quarries away from the city to reach their end-of-life so they can dig the tunnels to them and use them for stormwater holding.
But the problem, now that these giant things exist, is that they aren’t the panacea they were thought to be. Large storms of today’s era are dumping too much water in too short an amount of time. You just can’t build big enough.