The Whole Building Design Guide

Just a note regarding an excellent overview from a publication by the National Institute of Building Sciences with links to resources regarding location and construction characteristics of safe habitation.  The link to The Guide is here.  The guide says:

Only after the overall risk is fully understood should mitigation measures be identified, prioritized, and implemented. Basic principles underlying this process include:

• Hazard mitigation is at the core of disaster resistance and supports achieving resilience... Mitigation is an essential part of ensuring continuity of businesses, schools, government facilities, utilities, and communities following hazard events.
  
• Unsustainable development also is one of the major factors in the rising costs of natural disasters. Many mitigation design strategies and technologies serve double duty, by not only preventing or reducing disaster losses but serving the broader goal of long-term community sustainability. For example, land use regulations prohibiting development in flood-prone areas may also help preserve the natural and beneficial functions of floodplains.
  
• Mitigation serves to attenuate the cascading effects where hazard events degrade an asset, or community of assets, then such degradations propagate throughout the asset, or community of assets. During this propagation of degradations, additional hazards might be created, thus further increasing the rate and magnitude of functional degradations of assets.
  
• Unanticipated interactions from concurrent or sequential multi-hazard events (dependent or independent; natural, man-made or accidental) may result in a compounded impact with cascading effects and previously unconsidered consequences. Such consequences may be further amplified by outside factors such as poor maintenance of assets, or failure to increase infrastructure capacity with rising demand. Failure to follow an interdependent multi-hazard resilience strategy considering cascading effects may result in unanticipated and costly consequences from an asset-based perspective, and from corresponding effects projected into the community.
  
• The impacts of natural hazards and the costs of the disasters they cause will be reduced whether mitigation measures are implemented during new construction (preventively) or as retrofits (correctively). Proactively integrating mitigation measures into new construction is typically more economically feasible than retrofitting existing structures.
  
• Risk reduction techniques must address as many applicable hazards as possible. This approach, known as all-hazard mitigation, is the most cost-effective approach, maximizes the protective effect of complementary mitigation measures and optimizes all-hazard design techniques with other building technologies.
  
• High-performance buildings should be designed to adopt strategies that exceed model building code requirements for disaster resistance.