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Message: [QUOTE="Shenexon, post: 4380341, member: 129"] While I agree with much of what you said, we also need to learn from these events to mitigate against what we know will happen again. If we're going to rebuild destroyed structures with the same kinds of buildings and in the same places, what have we learned? I worked for FEMA for a long time. There are disasters some place almost all the time. Many of those are repeat events. Some places with frequent hurricanes deal with it with concrete structures rather than wood frame construction. If we're going to build on barrier islands, it's easy to see what not to rebuild. My parents had a woodframe retirement home about a mile from the atlantic ocean not far north of west palm beach. It was damaged three times in two years by hurricanes. They couldn't afford insurance and I spent years fixing their home knowing it was only a matter of time before it was damaged again. There are villages and cities in the northeast that are prone to floods and people rebuild homes in the same places where their destroyed homes were located in the 100 year flood plain. How is that a good play? About 25 years ago, large swaths of the Midwest were underwater and entire towns were moved from the flood plain to the bluffs above. Those people learned. I live in hail country with a metal roof that looks like a golf ball. People actually replace damaged shingle roofs with more shingles. Huh? This is also high fire danger territory. Many homes are built with fire resistant materials but many aren't. Homeowners insurance is expensive here. I had one fire get within about 10 miles of my house and it destroyed hundreds of homes. My go bag was ready. Every place has its liabilities but insurance isn't the only answer. Barrier islands and coastline may not be the best places to build structures that can't weather major storms and massive storm surge. The very ground those places are built on can change with every storm. How much risk is too much? How many times should our society pay to repair damage that could have been foreseen? I'm not just taking about coastlines. River flooding causes massive damages that repeat with regularity. Eventually we need to learn to give nature some space and respect its power. JMHO [/QUOTE]

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