Fire and brimstone seems particularly destructive and thorough.
The rabbis suggest may have been due to the geography. The cities that were destroyed happened to be within the borders of the Holy Land that God promised to Abraham. The Holy Land is a place that devours and then vomits out wickedness.
So they brought a bad report of the land which they had spied out to the sons of Israel, saying, “The land through which we have gone to spy out is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are people of great stature.
Numbers 13:32 (NASB)
The rabbis point to the spies who scouted out the Promised Land, and suggest that the spies reported correctly, but they did not understand the reason for the land’s behavior.
So Moses must explain to his people before they enter: This is a Holy Land. It must be treated as Holy.
“Now the future generation, your sons who rise up after you and the foreigner who comes from a distant land, when they see the plagues of that land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it, will say, ‘All its land is brimstone and salt, burned debris, unsown and unproductive, and no grass grows on it, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and in His wrath.’
Deuteronomy 29:22-23 (NASB)
But perhaps there is another teaching here that coincides with this.
The “total” destruction isn’t actually total. It’s a part of the bigger land. The land is your heart.