BugBash'26: Day 2

Ok, finally getting sometime to put my butt down to write about day 2 of BugBash.Why do so few buildings fall down?Brian Potter, Senior Infrastructure Fellow @ Institute for Progress, Author of Construction Physics newsletter.Buildings rarely collapse. The rate of major structural failing is between 1/100K to 1/ 1 million. (This is how I know this is a serious statistic: it is an interval.) Why don't more buildings fall down?There are some technical reasons to it: buildings are simple stuctures with no (or little) moving parts. Buildings exhibit a limited number of behavior when you load their structure: stress, deflection, vibration, creep, etc. And these behaviors are commensurate to the proportion of the force you put in. Finally, buildings are designed for 2X-3X of expected load.Let's go deeper into structural elements. We have good theories for how structural elements behave, and individual components are tested extensively and are standardized. A building is exposed to a bounded…