Here in Vancouver, the expert consensus is that the probability of a magnitude 9 earthquake is something like 0.1% to 0.4% per year. That's not a lot on an annual basis, but if you plan to spend, say, 40 years here, the cumulative risk is significant, at least if you believe the estimates (I'm told by an expert that one should have low confidence in the estimates, but that's a topic for another post). When we looked at automotive safety in 2020, we saw that almost every car manufacturer does the minimum necessary to score well in crash tests and no more, assuming no one is cheating. Since then, it's been found that there has been major cheating for crash tests. In 2024, Toyota was caught cheating*, with a number of cheats, including cutting away a panel inside the vehicle that would cut the test dummy on impact. After Toyota was caught, it also came out that Mazda, Honda, and Suzuki were cheating test results as well. These are all Japanese manufacturers because this came out when the Japanese government investigated cheating (it's unknown how much cheating would be found if other car companies were investigated). Should we expect building safety any different? Let's start with what we know and can verify. Unlike with cars, there isn't an agency that goes around testing copies of buildings I might live in, so we can't get direct data, but we can make some inferences based on what's observable. Assuming the building code is designed correctly, buildings in Vancouver th...