Planet Money
Planet Money

Inside the insurance industry’s destruction lab

November 6, 2026

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5 min read

Inside the insurance industry's destruction lab

On a muggy morning in rural South Carolina, reporter Alexei Horowitz-Gazi walked into an enormous warehouse to meet Anne Cope, a structural engineer who regularly sets houses on fire for a living. "We want to sacrifice the structures here in the lab," Cope explained. Her team outfits them with sofas, magazines, and potato chips in the cabinets—exactly like a normal home—because they need to know how that stuff burns, what kind of heat and embers it produces, and what threat it creates for the rest of the community. The goal: "so that we can burn fewer of our neighborhoods."

This warehouse is a destruction sandbox. Engineers subject homes not only to fire but also to hail and hurricane-force wind, generated by 105 industrial fans with 350-horsepower motors each—enough to recreate a Category 3 hurricane. On the day of the visit, researchers were preparing to burn bushes placed at varying distances from a test house, measuring which plants at which drought levels pose the greatest threat. The lab is not run by FEMA, the South Carolina fire service, or the construction industry. It is funded by some of the biggest insurance companies in the world.

How insurance became a research industry

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:32) **Walking into the Insurance Industry's Destruction Lab** - Reporter Alexei Horowitz-Gazi arrives at a massive warehouse in South Carolina to meet Anne Cope, who leads a team that deliberately builds and destroys houses to study how they fail.
  • 2 (04:22) **Who Pays for This Destruction Playground?** - The lab is not run by FEMA or the government; it is funded by some of the world's biggest insurance companies.
  • 3 (06:25) **The Insurance Geek Explains the Industry's Origins** - Julie Rochman, a self-described "insurance geek," explains that property-casualty insurance is the "oxygen of commerce," enabling risk-taking in an entrepreneurial economy.
  • 4 (11:53) **The Birth of Insurance-Funded Research: Electricity and Cars** - The insurance industry first banded together for experimental research when electricity entered homes, creating Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to test dangerous wiring and appliances.
  • 5 (14:32) **The Threat of Mega-Catastrophes** - After Hurricane Katrina and the 2007 Witch Creek Wildfire, insurers realized that billion-dollar disasters were becoming unsustainable and could destroy the property-casualty insurance industry.
  • 6 (16:53) **Raising $40 Million Through Peer Pressure** - Julie Rochman had to cater her pitch to different insurance companies based on their regional risks: hurricanes for Florida, high winds and hail for Colorado, tornadoes for the Midwest.
  • 7 (19:17) **The Inaugural Test: A House Blows Away** - In fall 2010, the lab was ready, and IBHS invited insurance executives to watch two houses—one built to standard code, one with extra fortifications—get hit with hurricane-force winds.

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Show Notes

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:

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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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