“If a cat 1 creates this amount of issues, the folks up north will need to some rethinking as a cat 2 or 3 would be a doozy for them. I can’t imaging what they would do with a cat 4.”
There isn’t a city out there that is prepared for a cat. 4.
As bad as Andrew was, which IIRC was a strong cat 3, if it had hit further south in Miami it would have been an even bigger disaster. But while Andrew was a powerful storm, it was small and tightly compacted with many embedded tornados.
What people need to understand when comparing hurricanes in the south and hurricanes and nor’easters in the NE, even if of similar size and strength is that they can’t really be compared.
For one thing the NE (mid-Atlantic up through New England) is the most densely populated region in the country; a hurricane, even a cat 1 is going to impact millions more people. Also the infrastructure is older, the topography is different, most of the houses not built to withstand hurricane force winds, the types of trees are different, the rivers and streams beds narrower and more prone to flooding.
That is not to say that I’m in anyway mitigating the devastating hurricanes that have killed many thousands and caused devastation to my southern friends and neighbors over the years, but for us up north along the mid-Atlantic and NE, there is not really much we can do to prepare for a hundred year event like this one, other than to use some common sense and hunker down.
Galveston got smacked by a Cat 4. So did Houston. We called it Ike. Both cities came out of it relatively unscathed.