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Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

Don't know about Switzerland, but as an European living in the US, I think the American fire safety rules are what they are mainly because most houses here are basically matchstick houses built from prefab low quality wood which would get devoured by flames in minutes. And the fire-resistant building materials are super toxic when they actually burn. So fire is a very big deal...

Anecdotal, we had a fire in my building because the wrong type of lightbulbs were installed in the hallways and because of their size, they were too close to the drywall which in turn caught fire. So.. yeah. Matchstick.

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I stayed in a house in Germany in which the walls were filled with dried-straw for insulation. It was several hundred years old. There was a no-smoking rule.

> There was a no-smoking rule.

Which to be honest says not a lot about anything, because this isn't that unusual in Central Europe.

Also: a lot of the old wooden houses are far better in terms of fire resistance than you'd suspect on first glance, wood often outperforms concrete and steel when it comes to structural integrity in a fire.

I don't know about the straw thing, I only know it mixed with clay.

The no-smoking bit was me being a bit, ah, dry. Sorry it didn't come across better.

The home in question belonged to the extended family of my host family while I was an exchange student. I went with them to a maintenance day and did wallpaper. I got a very close look at the walls, not to mention the repeated lectures on what a firetrap it was.

Trust me, it was.

I have a similar anecdote. The walls of the main building at my university were full of hay and paraffin wax. This is in the UK. We were very conscious of fire safety there...

For about the last 20 years of my life as an American, 99.9% of all buildings I enter have a no-smoking rule. The only exceptions have been bars in kind of backwards places that I've had to go on business, like Jacksonville, FL.

> Don't know about Switzerland, but as an European living in the US, I think the American fire safety rules are what they are mainly because most houses here are basically matchstick houses built from prefab low quality wood which would get devoured by flames in minutes. And the fire-resistant building materials are super toxic when they actually burn.

Also US electric plugs are inherent fire hazards, much more so than anything you find in europe.

It’s probably more to do with the age of the buildings. Generally you don’t need to update the safety level to today’s standars unless you do some major changes.

It may or may not be the case that US houses catch fire more often, but fire is always a very big deal if it does happen and then you really don’t want to be locked inside the ‘fire-proof’ house.

> prefab low quality wood

Excuse me? What exactly is "low quality wood"?

What are you claiming determines "wood quality"? And are you insinuating that "high" quality wood somehow... burns more slowly or something? All of this is new to me...

Also the vast majority of US homes are not prefab at all, not sure what that has to do with anything. And I'm not aware of a correlation between prefab construction techniques and fire hazards.

Now it's absolutely true that different parts of the world use different materials -- cinder blocks vs. wood vs. stone -- but that has much more to do with climate, available materials, and century of construction, rather than "quality".

Wood generally falls into two categories: hardwood and softwood. Hardwoods like oak are more dense, harder to light, and take longer to grow, so they are more expensive. Softwoods like pine are less dense, easier to light, and grow faster, so they are cheaper. Within each category there are additional ranges of cost and quality.

New homes in America tend to be wood-framed. Cheap materials are popular in American home construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softwood

Thank you, you beat me to it.

I would add this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... which explains my matchstick metaphor

> Building codes evolved, too, as insurers and fire-safety-equipment manufacturers pushed for scientific, “performance-based” codes that emphasized lab-determined fire-resistance ratings over specific materials and incorporated new technologies such as the automated fire sprinkler.

> Stick construction allows builders to use cheaper casual labor rather than often-unionized skilled tradespeople. And it makes life easier for electricians, plumbers, and the like because it leaves open spaces through which wires, pipes, and ducts can run. Still, there’s a reason why stick wasn’t the default for big apartment buildings until recently, and why these buildings are limited in height: Sticks burn.

> Now it's absolutely true that different parts of the world use different materials -- cinder blocks vs. wood vs. stone -- but that has much more to do with climate, available materials, and century of construction, rather than "quality".

Another reason you missed is money. Ticky tacky is cheap and ubiquitous in your average dwelling in America.

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