I'm sorry about your tree.
To riff of your post, we bought out first house, in Orlando, two years after Hurricane Andrew. When we tried to get homeowner's insurance, most companies weren't insuring in Florida. We finally found a company that did, and our rep said, "You live in the tiny sliver in the middle of the state we still insure." In a six-month period, our house was hit by lightning three times, and the last time, it almost burned down (part of it did burn) and we had to replace a ton of wiring and appliances. Good thing we were insured. In the time we lived in that neighborhood, many of our neighbor's houses were hit and had significant damage. Computers, appliances, structural damage, etc. Turns out, we lived in what some called the "Lightning Capital." Oh, and when you live where there is a lot of lightning, you get frequent hail damage.
Should no one live in Florida?
The following opinion in agreement is completely not hyperbole:
It is my opinion that over-concern for safety is one of the three most toxic and destructive mindsets modern Americans have developed, along with hyper-developed self-esteem and a romanticized myth of rugged self-reliance.
The notion of safety that drives the public discourse on disaster responses is, imo, based on an unrealistic expectation of nothing dangerous or seriously disruptive ever happening and that people should never have to adjust their lifestyles to suit a potentially dangerous environment.
Thus, people go to live on coasts, where there are many good reasons for people to live, but they refuse to build houses that can either withstand hurricanes or be cheaply replaced after hurricanes, and they refuse to cooperate with land-use restriction, evacuation plans, etc., with such environmental issues in mind. Yet there seems to be an expectation that somehow the coast, the oceans, the atmosphere will be made safe for them not to do those things. I see similar patterns with settlements on flood plains. Civilization depends on flood plains, but the key factor of a flood plain is flooding. Yet, I see persistent resistance to the idea of building and engineering for floods.
We live on a geologically and climatically active planet. It provides us with lots of ways to die. There comes a point where we just have to embrace it and run with it and stop worrying about every single thing that could possibly occur. If we don't like floods, we can have lightning. Don't like lightning, we can have earthquakes. Nix on earthquakes? Okay, how about fires, volcanos, tornados, droughts, avalanches? Some locusts, perhaps?
And all of that is without the intervention of our fellows humans who give us poisoned water, depleted fisheries, soil erosion, wetlands destruction, algae blooms, epidemics, and war, as well as premature death from the cumulative damage of the stress of dealing with rampant bullshit.
My own personal stance is we should stop fighting the planet. We should accept its nature and organize our lives to ride it and even exploit it rather than shovel against the tides, as it were. Romney recently mocked Obama's environmental policies as "promising to lower the oceans" or words to that effect. The way I see it, though, if anyone is pushing back against the inevitable and wasting effort and money in a struggle they will never win, it is those who ignore the force of the natural environment.
The point of all of the above is that I think there should be insurance against natural disasters but we should not be parsing out every single detail of possibilities because there are just too many. And I think people should rebuild on storm-devastated coasts, and on flood-ravaged plains, and in the shadows of volcanos, etc., because there are sound practical reasons for doing so. But we should build smart, not just to squeeze as many dollars out of an area as possible before it gets destroyed again. There should be much stronger restrictions on development on barrier islands, wetlands, and dune beaches. There should be environmental engineering requirements in building codes, mandatory to get insurance on any replacement structure, so that building styles that don't suit the environment can be slowly weeded out. There should be county and municipal planning commissions that are charged with designing towns and roads and utilities around common environmental hazards of an area.
And actually, I think the US would do well as a nation to establish a WPA-style projects program to develop new engineering specifically to exploit the dynamics of our new, changing, and more energetic climate.