How are a hurricane and a divorce alike?
Someone's gonna loose a pick-up, a trailer and the dog.
But seriously flooding and the storm surge from hurricanes are what give me the willies living anywhere near the coast in the Gulf Coast or Southeast/Mid Atlantic region. The highest point in the state of Florida is the roof of a hotel in Miami! Much of Jacksonville could be inundated by a storm surge. I worked in Charleston SC after Hugo and the storm surge from that came fifty miles inland. The damage was incredible.
A modern wood frame home with sheer walls and the most recent fastening systems on a steel reinforced concrete slab will survive almost any earthquake as long as there isn't ground rupture right under the slab. I have some hands on with wood frame homes and big quakes and they do all right. Check the Aquist-Priolo fault maps before you buy and stay away from known faults. Bolt book cases, refrigerators and everything to the studs in the walls, child lock cabinet doors, don't put a lot of nick-nacks on shelves and you have very little damage afterwards. But there is almost nothing that can survive a storm surge. All you can do is run and pick up the pieces afterwards.
My dream home would use steel construction, steel frame, steel roof, various types and textures of steel, especially Corten weathering steel, tile, brick and concrete on the exterior, ceramic coatings on the roof to insulate it from heat, different ceramic coatings on the inside surfaces of the steel to insulate it (since the US Navy dumped asbestos lagging for insulating their ships,and brother you have to realize that a steel ship in 98 degree heat and direct sunlight of the North Arabian Sea gets mighty hot, too hot to even touch, the Navy switched to ceramic coatings on inside surfaces, even beneath flight decks, to obtain equal insulating values), plaster interior walls on steel latch, ceramic tile floors everywhere but the bedrooms, steel door frames throughout with granite thresholds from carpeted rooms to the hallway, solid core doors even on the interior, fire rated walls between every room, sprinklers including attic sprinklers, deeply baffled attic vents (reduces the risk of embers from a fire entering the attic and starting a fire, the usual mechanism by which homes are lost in big California wild fires), and a fire alarm system. There should be nothing in the house that is flammable except the furnishings and the carpet in the bedrooms.
The house would feature 10 foot wide verandas around the entire exterior to keep the walls shaded all day and aid keeping the home cool in the summer. All windows would be of the dual pane low-e value type with a reflective coating and rooms would feature ten foot ceilings and Big-Ass fans (check their website out). Four car detached garage, natch, with the same construction features as the house. One bay of the garage would have an electric lift and there would be a work/storage/vacuum display room with a roll up door opening into the bay with the lift. Both house and garage would use evaporative cooling with a twist, a chiller to cool the water down to about 2 degees C, just above freezing, and a heavily insulated outer cover. Coolers would be ground level under the veranda on the north side of the house and garage where they will be shaded all day. Cool air in rooms would be vented through ceiling vents into the attic space to cool it, a feature that is common today in desert homes including my present home. You slide a sheet of plastic into each of these vents for the winter to retain heat. I do this when I shut the cooler down for the winter and remove them in the spring when I fire the cooler back up.
Lots of recessed low wattage lights in the ceilings supplanted by floor lights for reading or dining. The kitchen would be fluorescent lit and bright, with a pass through to the patio for food. The dining area would have a big bay window protruding into the patio.
The property would have a solar PV array sufficient to power the entire house with the coolers, washer and dryer all running and still recharge the back up battery system so there is electricity all through the night. I would not be off grid, but want to be able to both keep the bill down in the summer and to have a back up in case power is lost due to a natural disaster, a brush fire takes out a major power transmission line, or some big malfunction on the grid that blacks out a region (we've seen that happen before)
