CityLab Daily: Your Building Code Won't Save You

Waiting for the Big One: As San Francisco rethinks its seismic regulations, the message from experts is clear: The building code won’t save you from the earthquakes. The New York Times maps where the biggest risk exists today and looks back to the last time an earthquake devastated the city, on April 18, 1906. The big unknown is that modern skyscrapers have yet to be tested by the unpredictable power of earthquakes. “It’s kind of like getting in a new airplane that’s only been designed on paper but nobody has ever flown in it,” one skeptic told the Times.

Cleaning up: A toxic waste site in Houston has been removed from the EPA’s “Emphasis List” of Superfund sites, with the agency citing progress on a cleanup plan since Hurricane Harvey, NPR reports. The two companies responsible for the site have agreed to a $115 million clean-up plan for the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a heavily contaminated area near homes and schools that was exposed by the September hurricane. The site has been on the Superfund list since 2008.