system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are so many buildings in the tornado zones of the USA build out of wood? Why not concrete / stone?
gpt
In this thread:  A bunch of people who have never seen a tornado giving loud opinions of how lax the building codes seem in the Midwest.

People want to compare to earthquakes and hurricanes, which routinely go through and lightly destroy every single house in a city.  You write building codes to protect against those things, because if there's damage, it'll be spread equally through the whole region.  It really sucks rebuilding every last house in town, and it's worth spending the extra money up front to save down the road.

Tornadoes aren't like that.  Statistically, it's *very* unlikely for any individual house to get hit, and on average only a couple hundred per year actually do.  But if you're one of the unlucky few, it's like the wrath of god targeting your house all by itself.  Wood, brick, block, it really doesn't matter; it *will* fail.  This is no puny hurricane with some rain and gentle breezes.  This is a tiny pencil of annihilation, with wind speeds higher than any hurricane and with suspended particles from sand to gravel to farm equipment flying through the air.  If we built to withstand the worst of these, all our houses would look like hardened military bunkers and would cost millions of dollars apiece.  And even then, the windows would break out and all the stuff inside would be blended.

Basically, they destroy so few houses that it's not worth building to withstand them.  Which is good, because it's not actually possible to build that strongly.

Here's Wikipedia's description of an EF5 tornado (the strongest rating):
>EF5 (T10+) damage represents the upper limit of tornado power, and destruction is almost always total. An EF5 tornado pulls well-built homes off their foundations and into the air before shredding them, flinging the wreckage for miles and sweeping the foundation clean. Very little recognizable structural debris is generated by EF5 damage, with most materials reduced to a coarse mix of small, granular particles and dispersed evenly across the tornado's damage path. Large, multi-ton steel frame vehicles and farm equipment are often mangled beyond recognition and deposited miles away or reduced entirely to unrecognizable component parts.