I've heard this sort of sentiment come from Europeans before. Apparently it's part of the "stupid americans" myth in Europe that American construction is "shodd

I've heard this sort of sentiment come from Europeans before. Apparently it's part of the "stupid americans" myth in Europe that American construction is "shoddy" and that's why weather is so destructive here. Of course Europe receives very few hurricanes because they typically move from east to west from the intertropical convergence zones and Europe has no east coast exposed to an ITCZ. Some parts of Europe (such as Britain) receive many tornado strikes but ones with the intensity of those in America are rare. The USA is the only country that receives several F5 strikes per year, and the British tornado scale starts classification of cyclones at much lower wind speed, were we'd just describe it as an 'F0' or not even classify it as a tornado. An F2 on our scale (T4 on theirs) struck Birmingham in 2006 and caused forty million pounds of damage to many brick buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_%28UK%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_%28UK%29 Brick is actually a poor material to use against high wind loads because has little tensile strength. When high loads are applied to a brick wall, the two ends of it are supported by the adjoining walls, which cause bending stress on the wall, and tension on the interior of the wall between supports. The wall then buckles inward. The only truly suitable building materials are ones with high tensile strength: steel, reinforced concrete, and core-reinforced cinderblock. Practically speaking, the odds of any one building in the midwest getting hit by a tornado are very small and so people understandably don't want to live in a concrete bunker on the very slim chance that they get hit. Florida, however, does seem to have a great deal of concrete and masonry construction, even in homes. Although it's worth keeping in mind that the majority of the damage from a hurricane comes from flooding rather than wind.