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When you think of someone burning down a house for insurance purposes, you don’t imagine it would ever be the insurance company itself lighting the match. But that’s essentially what’s happening inside a giant destruction laboratory, funded by the insurance industry, in the woods of South Carolina. Scientists and engineers there build household structures — from decks to sheds to single family homes — and subject them to literal trials by fire, hail, and hurricane force wind. It’s all in hopes of determining which building materials and techniques will make communities across the country more resilient to natural disasters and make those natural disasters less expensive for insurance companies.
Today on the show, Planet Money goes inside the destruction lab to see that high octane experimentation in action and to learn about how the insurance industry has been quietly shaping the world around us for over a century.
For more about how natural disasters are changing the insurance industry:
Video of IBHS Research Center blowing down a house (https://vimeo.com/16094164?fl=pl&fe=cm)
Episode 797: Flood Money (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/episode-797-flood-money)
Episode 570: The Fine Print (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/09/19/349650496/episode-570-the-fine-print)
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Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life (https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD)
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This episode was produced by Vito Emanuel and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez with help from Emma Peaslee. It was engineered by Annlie Huang and Travis Hagan. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Music: NPR Source Audio — “Lone Star Desert Surfer,” “Highride,” “Rumba De Maghreb”
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Inside a recent episode
Inside the insurance industry’s destruction lab
Published 6 Nov 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] Anne says these techniques have already made a big difference in communities where they've been implemented at scale. Take the state of Alabama. Insurance regulators there offered direct grants to homeowners to fortify their roofs to an IBHS standard to prevent wind and rain from getting in. […]
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