Decimate- in modern parlance can also mean to capriciously and arbitrarily destroy or kill- as in a plague that might decimate a population.... that does not imply that a tenth were killed, but rather refers to the Roman practice of soldiers drawing lots to determine which would be put to death in punishment. i.e. ANY capricious or arbitrary form of reduction or destruction.
Its only functional dissimilarities to the word annihilate are, firstly, that annihilation implies total eradication, whereas decimation would require SOME to be left. and secondly, that annihilation implies intent or purpose, whereas decimation implies a certain randomness or senselessness.
You might not apply it to A house in a hurricane, but you might apply it to an entire community of houses being decimated- implying that many were destroyed, and destroyed in a capricious or arbitrary manner.
Similarly- decimate is also commonly used in digital polygonal modeling to refer to an operation that reduces the number of polygons in a model by combining any two polygons whose normals fall within an arbitrarily selected angular range. Again, in this use, while you control the limiting angle, you do not control which specific polygons are lost..
