That only answers one half of the question, doesn't it? Germany should also have the same unlimited supply of timber (it has the same percentage of forests of their land area), so why don't Germans build wood houses?
There's actually an extraordinary gap between the two.
Having the same percentage of forests is not the same thing as having the same supply of renewable timber. You're forgetting about population density. The US has vastly more timber supply vs population, than Germany does.
US territory size is something like 26x the size of Germany, with just 4x the population difference.
304 million hectares of forests vs 330 million people in the US. A near 1 ratio for hectares per person.
11 million ha of forests vs 82 million people in Germany. A 0.13 ratio.
Now throw in Canada, which is an almost comical 347 million ha (and their modest domestic needs for 36 million people).
Whenever I see a report about a tornado or a hurricane in the US I wonder what the damage would be like if people had stone houses instead of wooden houses that disintegrate during a storm and then in turn damage other houses. It reminds me of the Kessler Syndrome.
Most of the damage during a hurricane occurs due to the storm surge, which is a wall of water that is pushed up on land and then drains back out.
Even if the structure remains intact - and storm surges have no problem washing concrete and stone away - the house has to be ripped apart. The flooding ruins sheetrock, furniture, carpet, etc and mold growth is a huge issue.
The wind is usually not that big a deal unless you have a tornado during the hurricane. I have a 100 year old wood framed house that has been though many hurricanes, including Katrina. Generally the worst case wind-wise for most people is that you see some minor roof damage and little else unless a tree falls on the house. Wooden houses certainly do not "disintegrate" during storms.
Depends on whether you're in a flood zone. A lot of Florida isn't in flood zones, so storm surge isn't a cause for most of the damage there, it's trees and wind and debris. However, flood zones around the world are growing.
You don't need to be in a flood zone to be impacted by a storm surge. You just have to live within ~30ft of sea level. The majority of the gulf coast is pretty flat. Flood-zone maps do get redrawn after every major hurricane, but that's not so much a matter of climate change so much as exactly where the storm hits. Places that have never flooded in a hundred years will flood if a hurricane makes land in the right place, simply because it pushes a couple dozen feet of water ahead of it.
Debris doesn't cause a lot of damage, particularly if you've prepped for the hurricane (by boarding up windows, garaging cars, etc.) The biggest factors are definitely trees and storm surge.
The roof in a brick house would still get ripped off, as would the windows and doors. Depending on wind speed the walls might or might not survive but the house would cost just about as much to repair.
Nearly all house roofs are pitched, at least in the southeast. I have never seen one that wasn't. Very sharp pitches are more common in newer homes, though, in my experience.
In the UK you struggle to get a mortgage on a wooden construction so have to be cash rich, you'd also struggle to get conventional housing insurance cover.
Nope thats not it. Many houses built in the UK now have a timber structure with a (mostly) non load bearing brick or blockwork skin on the outside. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a new build house that is timber or masonry structure, once it has been sheeted out inside. Timber cladding externally is less common.
I believe exterior timber was banned in London after the fire of 1666, and in many other towns not so long after that. A brick skin just gives you much more time to stop a fire from spreading. Even when the exterior walls are load-bearing brick, a lot of internal structure may still be in wood.
That's not strictly true, the rules [0] on what fire tests a cladding material must conform to are quite complicated and depend on how close adjoining buildings are and whether there are any windows in them.
Right, I'm sure the modern rules are very detailed. But at some rough level of walking around & looking at buildings, there's a step change right after the great fire.
Wood houses are slowly coming to Germany too, but there seems to be a cultural refusal to them. Maybe it's because of WW2 and the bombing of the cities? Maybe a solid concrete house is feeling more safe in german heads?
It goes back a quite a lot longer, actually. Over the years, many cities have outlawed wooden buildings due to fire risk. It wasn't uncommon for an entire city to burn down to the ground. It may be possible to build fire-proof buildings nowadays, but the safety of stone is now a part of the culture.
Germany has less than 5% of Canada's land area and more than double the population. You could pretty much drop the entire country into a Canadian forest.
