Rating States' Hurricane Resilience

When it comes to the "as built" and "about to be built" infrastructure, building codes have a significant impact on the disaster resilience of communities. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) does a rating of states subject to hurricanes. With the hurricane season knocking on our doors, it isn't a bad time to look at those ratings. See Rating the States: 2015 (yes, I know this is a year out of date, but it is what I found lately).

Texas is alone at the bottom of the resilience pile of states. Lack of a statewide building code will do that for you.

Building codes are one of the critical elements to building a more disaster-resilient state. Aris Papadopoulos has a great discussion on building codes in Chapter 9 the Story of Building Codes, in his book, Resilience: The Ultimate Sustainability.


I especially liked the quotation from the Hammurabi Code, 1792 B.C.

Code 229: If a builder builds a house for a man and the house he builds falls and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death.

Now that would be enforcement and motivation to build quality homes for people.