>The American ingenuity is 'remarkable' indeed. All those houses appear to be so fragile, being mainly from wood. Is that on purpose (fragile is cheaper to rebuild)? And I wonder why the Americans build a whole city in a soup bowl, in an area where hurricanes visit the ground each year. Doesn't sound ingenious to me.

Hi Peter,

That's a pet peeve of mine: construction practices in this country. It's as if the story of the three pigs and the wolf was forbidden to be read here!

I read a bit about "american construction techniques" a while ago and, as opposed to what is done in other countries, where main columns (mostly in the corners) support the weight of a house, here the weight of the house is supported by a number of wood beams (2" x 4" sections) every 16" or so.

This came to be because many many years ago, it was very difficult to get wood good enough to use as main supports, so ingenuititious builders came up with a solution: distribute the load among a number of less-capable beams and use more of them (in the walls). This way the structure is technically over-supported if all the beams are first quality, or just supported if some of the beams are allowed to fail.

Please note that higher buildings are built differently, but 99.999999% of all structures that are 4 or less floors high are built in this stupid way.

Nowadays the reasoning is that it'll probably be cheaper to fess-up to paying millions when disaster strikes and loose some lives, rather than spend the money up front and use better building techniques. If you can, rent a movie called "Class Action" (with Gene Hackman) and you'll get the idea of how things that may fail "work" here.

Alex