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Comment by escherplex | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to view before/after images of Mexico Beach Florida. Appears a particular house at the end of 36th street survived relatively unscathed yet the surrounding homes were demolished. An old googlemaps street view of the area suggests that the bulk of homes were of frame construction. Yet this particular one looks to be of solid concrete block construction. The same sorts of results were visible after hurricane Charlie struck SW Florida in 2004. Concrete block houses survived with some roof damage (particularly those with Howard Johnson style orange curved roof tiles) but frame houses were demolished. This would be time for an enforced, no exemptions, building code change.

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The real problem is the storm surge. The frame or concrete surviving doesn't matter much if you have to tear it all down anyway, because water ruins everything.

Wood frame houses can absolutely be built to withstand wind damage. The problem depicted in these pictures is mostly storm surge.

After Mohenjo-daro was excavated they found that the city had been rebuild on top of itself a few times. They theorise that it got flooded when the Indus river left it's banks. They just added more bricks to the walls and the city got higher. From what I remember looking at the ruins it happened 3 or 4 times and some of the walls were 3+ stories tall. It's weird to think that 3-4 thousand years ago they build bulidings that survived floods but we are still not able to .

The problem with hurricanes is USUALLY storm surge, but Hurricane Michael hit Mexico Beach with 150 mph sustained winds, effectively making it a very large EF3 tornado. NOAA predicted that wind would be the biggest problem, and if you watch any footage from Hurricane Michael, that's pretty much all it is with a side of storm surge.

What also happened is that this is not an area usually hit by hurricanes, so a lot of the structures were built mid-century and hadn't been put through the cycle of hurricane, rebuild, hurricane, rebuild that much of Florida has so lack of buildings up to the ol' post-Andrew code level is also a LOT of the problem.

> What also happened is that this is not an area usually hit by hurricanes

Having grown up on the Gulf coast, it's still mind blowing that many folks living on the Gulf coast still think they are immune to hurricanes if it has been several decades (e.g. 40yrs) since there was a direct hit in that area. The entire Gulf coast should have building standards to prepare for the inevitable.

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