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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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I always wonder what's going on in the heads of Americans when they go to an area notorious for being hit by hurricanes or tornadoes and then decide they should build their house out of basically toothpicks with some plaster. Here in Switzerland, pretty much everything except for maybe a garden shed is poured concrete, and I guarantee that if the folks in Florida or Oklahoma did the same the "devastation" would be comparatively tiny.
Europeans never understand why houses are made out of "flimsy" materials in the US.
The simple answer is that your brick and mortar houses would also be completely destroyed by a hurricane or tornado or earthquake.
They're just way more expensive and take longer to rebuild.
The scale of natural disasters in the US is and always has been such that we expect buildings to be demolished by nature from time to time. Europe is a very stable place. The US is not.
Having a house that is lighter and stronger per pound than brick makes a lot of sense too. Stick frame houses can twist and shift a considerable amount and recover. Twist a brick house and it crumbles.
Japan builds skyscrapers that resist 8+ magnitude earthquakes. They are not made of sticks.
Neat. Show me one made of bricks or concrete.
A skyscraper made of concrete? Unpossible!
It’s an overpressure problem. A tornado causes a sudden vacuum, and the house can’t withstand the pressure. Brick will fly just like wood in these conditions.
We have 3.2+ earthquakes, well, the rate I get alerts I'd estimate every other month on average. 4-5 times a year in a hundred mile radius (what I've got alerts set at). You are correct. Brick is used at most as a facade around here.
We don't even issue alerts for anything below magnitude 5. Below 4 can barely be felt, we wouldn't even call that an earthquake here.
I would only find out on half of them because folks on reddit, mostly new arrivals to the area, would be freaking out "DID YOU FEEL THAT" and those of us who grew up here would be like "what, a truck?". Then I set up the google alert and you know.
I mistook a 4.0 for a plane flying over once. I am directly under an air road or whatever ya want to call it, ive seen everything from a B-29 to an Osprey.
How arrogant of you.
Florida is a little different than Switzerland, not least due to weather and poverty. There indeed ARE fully concrete and hemp-crete type homes (many styles of homes), but they are unpopular (but becoming more popular) because they trap damp (Florida is extremely humid, unlike Switzerland), grow mold, don't breathe, and cause sickness. Since 2005, all newly built homes are required to have concrete and rebar at certain areas including windows and doors.
https://www.etr-aw.com/full-concrete-homes/
They also are prone to cracking due to shifting. The lower blocks can absorb water, either through these cracks or cracks in waterproofing like paint, and then leak with every heavy rain. Cement (a component of concrete) is one of the largest CO2 emitters in its production, and cement dust is carcinogenic. Concrete houses that are flooded (eyewitnesses report up to 25-50feet of water height) will have to be gutted and possibly torn down anyway once flooded, since the flooding itself ruins everything and makes it unsafe. Since you'll have to gut the whole thing anyway, may as well use wood which can be replaced more easily.
Tornados (since you mentioned Oklahoma) can punch a 2x4 board through a concrete wall. Concrete isn't a Kevlar vest house against all weather types and it isn't an ideal material either for building in every climate.
If the people who were flooded had stayed because they had concrete houses, even more would have died, but instead drowned in a concrete box. This was a storm that needed evacuation.
Concrete houses are still being made in the humid regions near the equator and will still be made in the long future... As for the mold problem, the houses are made such that water seepage is minimised heavily.
Don't wooden houses have the problem of termites making big joint families of their siblings?
And full concrete houses are made in Florida currently. But the original question was why do some people prefer wood houses to concrete in Florida - and I gave a long list. Yes there are pros and cons to many materials. That's not really the original question though, which was asked pretty insensitively and condescendingly in a thread about a very recent, ongoing disaster where they are still finding bodies.
Maybe in proper houses they would be fixing broken windows instead of finding bodies.
"it's not the time to discuss solutions to this" seems to be the American way of dealing with any disaster, from hurricanes to mass shootings.
A proper house won't save people from fucking 25 FEET (7.6 meters) to 50 FEET of flooding in a hurricane. A ship can't even save them because it'll get knocked into houses. Same thing with a sub. There's weather you can't survive.
I never stated that. I am just unwilling to go over every building material pedantically when the problem - overwhelming climate events - isn't going to be fixed with fucking concrete blocks.
So don't build in flood-prone areas.
Wow, amazing thought. Tell me how the literal Appalachian mountains are a flood plain or flood prone.
Termite infestations are rare. And they can be easily eliminated through pesticide control if you should be that unfortunate.
Hi. Brazilian here. A very humid country where I live. Here, almost all houses are made of brick and concrete, even near the seashore. There are even entire concrete buildings near Brazilian beaches (such as Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Salvador, Recife, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis and so on) as well as near rivers (such as Manaus and even at the capital, Brasília). Indeed, mold is a thing, a thing that needs constant cleaning. Wall painting does a role in protecting from mold buildup.
We don't exactly have hurricanes (because it's scientifically a thing from the northern hemisphere) but we do have tornadoes and strong winds very often. We have hailstorms. However, there are very old houses and buildings still standing since 1800, centennial houses.
That's fine and perfectly allowed, but constant mold cleaning fyi isn't good for your health in general compared to minimal or no mold cleaning. The concrete holds moisture, and the paint is what keeps it at bay, sure. But there are likely other materials that can be developed that might not do this. And there's also the impact to the environment to consider, as well as health impacts of what could be getting offgassed in our paints and walls, especially when mixed with cleaners because they are constantly being moldy.
It's not that I personally think concrete houses are bad anyway. I personally think housing variety is important and that housing standards are also important as we learn more about civil engineering. I think concrete has limitations as a material, which is long established in material sciences, that no material is a "perfect" material for everything. There are risks and flaws and benefits to every choice. Therefore again, to answer the question of "well why not all full concrete houses?" It's mainly the 25 FEET OF FLOODING that makes it irrelevant as a solution in this case.
I've lived in the Caribbean. Well-off people lived in reinforced concrete buildings not in flood areas. Worst that usually happened is some broken window.
No plaster except on drywall seams.
Yes I’m sure you know better than the engineers who write building codes for a living.