| > IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive. It is not an aesthetic preference, the US used to construct housing like in Europe through the 19th century. That style of construction was repeatedly catastrophically destroyed by severe earthquakes, killing many people needlessly, and is now illegal in many regions. The US became strict about seismic safety after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake[0]. A few decades earlier, the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake[1] literally flattened entire towns of European-style construction; some of these are now ghost towns that were simply abandoned and never rebuilt. When you see surviving old masonry buildings, they usually have been retroactively refitted with steel frames to make the masonry mostly decorative. The regions of the US prone to wildfire are also prone to severe earthquakes, so your options are wood or steel frame construction, neither of which is particularly wildfire resistant but at least it won't collapse during a severe earthquake. Many parts of the US also have to engineer for much higher wind loadings than in Europe. You can build masonry buildings that meet the seismic standard but that requires a lot of steel and is expensive. Where I live, all modern construction is required to survive a M8.5 earthquake; I've never seen a house in Europe engineered to that standard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Owens_Valley_earthquake |
As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)