A good chunk of the area where tornadoes don’t happen, the west coast, earthquakes happen regularly and again, you do not want to build houses out of hard materials, you want buildings that can shake and sway and not fall down.
just to gently push back on this, most other places with more earthquakes do make their buildings out of concrete and brick
I stand gently corrected. I do believe my point still stands for the tornadoes part though, which is a problem basically everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains aside from Maine
Also it is cheaper, and since we have figured out how to manage wooden buildings in a way that gives us a very average number of fire deaths, I see no reason to switch. It does mean we need to keep requirements like “two fire escape staircases” though.
just to gently push back on this, most other places with more earthquakes do make their buildings out of concrete and brick
I stand gently corrected. I do believe my point still stands for the tornadoes part though, which is a problem basically everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains aside from Maine
Also it is cheaper, and since we have figured out how to manage wooden buildings in a way that gives us a very average number of fire deaths, I see no reason to switch. It does mean we need to keep requirements like “two fire escape staircases” though.
You’d have to control for fire deaths just in multi-unit buildings, though.