Why are houses made of wood rather than concrete in the tornado zones in the USA?

Question

Honestly, every year we hear about houses getting destroyed by tornados (and people getting buried under). They seem to be mostly wooden houses. So, why not build concrete houses, atleast in the high risk disaster prone areas?

In: 1750

Answer 1

I’m a General Contractor in Florida. We follow a lot of building codes designed to strengthen the home in the event of a hurricane. When I was taking the classes to obtain my license they taught us there is hurricane building code because hurricanes are a slow build up of pressure, and there is no tornado building code because there’s no point.