I moved to Florida in 2004 and almost immediately got hit by Charley, Frances, and Jeanne. Lost a lot of trees, had to replace my roof, had flooding, and went without power for two weeks each with Charley and Frances.
When Ivan hit the panhandle, I had a friend who worked for FEMA doing damage assessments. Talk about overpaid government workers! Besides making a fantastic salary they got free housing, food money, gas money, even dry cleaning money. I went up for about a week, stayed in a beautiful FEMA-paid gulf front condo in Destin, and traveled around with him looking at damaged properties. I saw water damage but no fire damage. Your theory that people set their houses on fire to collect insurance monies is pure BS.
Yes, there was damage but I can’t compare it with the pictures I’m seeing from Rockaway, from the entire metro area. They’re now saying 110 houses burned to the ground in Breezy. That was in a 3 or 4 block area. And that’s only a small section of the beach. Don’t be fooled by the numbers: Cat. 1 vs Cat. 5. You can’t compare the scarcely populated panhandle to a densely populated city.
Most New Yorker’s live in apartment buildings. I lived in a small building with only 72 families. Some have twice as many or more. And several building will be on a single block. That’s hundreds families in a very small area with no power, no water, no way to flush a toilet, no place to dispose of garbage, no heat, no stores, blocked roads, trapped where they are. Right now the temp is in the 40’s, is going down to the 30’s by the weekend.
Check out some of the Youtube videos being posted of different parts of Rockaway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzL-MFbxgTc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hok220ROmUg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjYdm5PAVR0&feature=channel&list=UL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVO5sY_o26A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpRNT-If6Pw
Anyone who won’t comprehend that there’s way more to a hurricane than category number has deliberately disengaged their brain and there’s no hope for them.
The impact of a hurricane on humanity is so dependent on so many factors that are not even meteorologically related, but some people simply cannot see beyond the end of their noses.
That’s what you get when people pontificate about matters of which they have no knowledge and sadly, we’ve seen a lot of that here on FR from people who you’d think would know better, or at least be willing to learn so they could know better.