Hybrid Hurricane/ Winter Storm

Vince524

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Some more pictures from another friend of mine from High School through Facebook.

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blacbird

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That's as may be, but right now they are suffering and in need of help.

This is true, and by no means do i oppose this effort.

But developers should never ever ever ever be permitted to rebuild residences in these areas. Property owners who lost this time should receive some level of compensation, and the shorelines affected should become public property for recreational purposes.

Such an effort, of course, would require governmental restriction, and God knows one of our two major political parties will oppose such an effort with every quark of their being.

caw
 

Filigree

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One of my distant cousins lived in NJ some years back. They moved to Nevada, but she sold their near-beachfront house to a friend. She sent me pics last night: the friend & family got out in time, but they came back to find the house gone. There's a foundation left and some pipes sticking up, but everything else got swept away. Same story with most of the houses nearby.

They won't be rebuilding near the shore.
 

Don

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This is true, and by no means do i oppose this effort.

But developers should never ever ever ever be permitted to rebuild residences in these areas. Property owners who lost this time should receive some level of compensation, and the shorelines affected should become public property for recreational purposes.

Such an effort, of course, would require governmental restriction, and God knows one of our two major political parties will oppose such an effort with every quark of their being.

caw
It doesn't require restriction so much as FedGov no longer guaranteeing homes built in dangerous locations with flood insurance.

"Build here all you want, mister rich guy, but don't stick your hand out when it slides into the sea. Not one penny will be spent by government to rebuild in areas declared unsafe, and good luck with finding any private insurer who's interested in writing a policy."

Fraud laws would cover the unscrupulous builder who builds in an unsafe area and tries to pawn it off as safe. Well, that and the zoning commission and the housing inspector of the modern nanny state, both of which would be involved well before somebody got suckered into such a fraudulent purchase.

It's quite possible to discourage without prohibiting, although gov at all levels, and many people, have a hard time making the distinction.

It's all well explained in Confessions of a Welfare Queen.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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This is true, and by no means do i oppose this effort.

But developers should never ever ever ever be permitted to rebuild residences in these areas. Property owners who lost this time should receive some level of compensation, and the shorelines affected should become public property for recreational purposes.

Such an effort, of course, would require governmental restriction, and God knows one of our two major political parties will oppose such an effort with every quark of their being.

caw

It doesn't require restriction so much as FedGov no longer guaranteeing homes built in dangerous locations with flood insurance.

"Build here all you want, mister rich guy, but don't stick your hand out when it slides into the sea. Not one penny will be spent by government to rebuild in areas declared unsafe, and good luck with finding any private insurer who's interested in writing a policy."

Fraud laws would cover the unscrupulous builder who builds in an unsafe area and tries to pawn it off as safe. Well, that and the zoning commission and the housing inspector of the modern nanny state, both of which would be involved well before somebody got suckered into such a fraudulent purchase.

It's quite possible to discourage without prohibiting, although gov at all levels, and many people, have a hard time making the distinction.

It's all well explained in Confessions of a Welfare Queen.

I would rather see government restrictions on building near the shore and shoreline property converted into wildlife refuges, public parks, and natural storm barriers such as wild shorelines have always been for inland areas, than see a laissez-faire attitude lead to more suffering, damage, and loss of life with the extra kick in the teeth of sneering at the people so afflicted while refusing them aid.

People have shown themselves willing to take foolish risks for beautiful surroundings for their homes. Historically, no matter how many people are callously allowed to die or laughed at for their foolishness, people on their own still take lethal risks.

Only strong government regulation can help reduce the risk to life and property.

Don, I have no idea where you got the notion that only rich people build near the shore. Perhaps that is true elsewhere, but on the northeast coast of the US there is true equality of opportunity. Plenty of non-rich people have houses on the shore, or only a few houses away. Look at the photos of the devastation in New Jersey. So many of those are clearly working class neighborhoods.
 

Jersey Chick

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Please remember that the Jersey shore is NOT just millionaires. It is regular ol' people. The majority of the houses are small bungalows. There are probably more blue-collar people living in shore towns than there are millionaires and a lot of them have had houses there for the better part of the last century.
 

Don

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Please remember that the Jersey shore is NOT just millionaires. It is regular ol' people. The majority of the houses are small bungalows. There are probably more blue-collar people living in shore towns than there are millionaires and a lot of them have had houses there for the better part of the last century.
Then how much worse is it that the government lures them to build or remain in areas where the likelihood of total destruction is almost assured sooner or later? I agree with Alessandra that those areas should be wildlife refuges, parks, and natural storm barriers such as wild shorelines.

My argument is that government should not be encouraging people to build or remain in those areas by insuring them against mother nature when the odds are so bad that nobody without limitless funds courtesy of the taxpayer would even consider writing policies in that area.

Government policy has been actively encouraging the habitation, development and repeated rebuilding in unsafe areas. How about we stop that and see what changes before we write yet another set of laws telling people they can't do something?

Good parents say "go ahead, make your own decisions, but don't expect us to bail you out if you screw up." That's how adults learn to use good judgement. Parents that try to micro-manage every decision of their children, following behind to clean up their messes and protect them from their mistakes are considered bad parents, but when the government does it, lots of people think that's a great idea. Whut? Is the default assumption now that the average adult is more stupid than the teenagers in one's own house?

This is a perfect example of Harry Browne's Crutches.
Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk."
"Go ahead, build in that foolish place. We'll insure you."

"Oh, no, your house washed away, everything is destroyed, and even your memories and keepsakes are gone? People even died because they built there? Here, have some crutches. Go ahead and rebuild, and we'll do this all again in a decade or so."
 
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Lyv

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Ok, so no helping out people who lose everything in hurricanes if they live too close to the ocean. How about people in the Midwest who live in areas prone to tornadoes? How about where there are frequent earthquakes? Rivers that rise?
 

firedrake

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Politics aside, has anyone heard from Stormie?
 

Little Red Barn

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just checking in and sending good thoughts to our east coasters.

and, looking for Stormie. =(
 

rhymegirl

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After reading some of your posts about people choosing to live where they live, I can relate this to you. After we had one of our trees go down in the storm someone close to me said, "I would never live in a house surrounded by trees."

Wow. That's nice. So now people can't live in the country?
 

Lyv

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After reading some of your posts about people choosing to live where they live, I can relate this to you. After we had one of our trees go down in the storm someone close to me said, "I would never live in a house surrounded by trees."

Wow. That's nice. So now people can't live in the country?

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?
 

RichardGarfinkle

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Funny thing about living by the shore or on flood plains or other areas susceptible to rising water: it's where humans settled so they could get food. Rivers are where people built cities. Oceans and rivers are where ports were built etc. The roots of human society came about by settling on places where there was water and transport by water.

And one other thing. Nature has so many dangers and humans are so vulnerable that there is no such thing as a safe place to live. There's only a choice of dangers and the vagaries of weather do a lot to remove the choice element there.
 

muravyets

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I agree. Society's response should not be "Don't live on the coasts or river flood plains." That's just not feasible. The response instead should be "How can we engineer our settlements to survive flooding, surges and storms, avoid complete disruption of communication, transport, water and food supply chains, and relatively minimize danger to human life?" Better yet, I'd like to see us adding the follow-up question of "How can we engineer our settlements and systems so that we benefit from these natural environmental events, rather than suffer from them?"

We're humans. We should be using our big brains to solve problems like this, not our long legs to run from them.

As for the inevitability of some kind of environmental danger everywhere we go... yeah, welcome to Planet Earth. Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy ride.
 

backslashbaby

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Our beaches and barrier islands from Va down the southeast coast aren't very inhabited. There are a few really tough enclaves of folks that are an exception (real oldtimers in the OBX!), but mostly the islands aren't considered buildable, and the beach homes are not primary residences.

I see nothing wrong with folks having beach cottages that they know will get washed away one year. They don't stay in them during hurricanes, of course. The culture is different, the hurricanes are much more frequent, and it works out fine, imho.

I doubt they can be insured. When looking up beach rentals at our favorite beaches, the question is usually 'Is XXX cottage still there after (name of hurricane or storm)? Yeah? Great, we'd like to rent it for July..."
 

muravyets

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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.
 

Lavern08

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Still no word from Stormie. :cry:
 

Don

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I agree. Society's response should not be "Don't live on the coasts or river flood plains." That's just not feasible. The response instead should be "How can we engineer our settlements to survive flooding, surges and storms, avoid complete disruption of communication, transport, water and food supply chains, and relatively minimize danger to human life?" Better yet, I'd like to see us adding the follow-up question of "How can we engineer our settlements and systems so that we benefit from these natural environmental events, rather than suffer from them?"

We're humans. We should be using our big brains to solve problems like this, not our long legs to run from them.

As for the inevitability of some kind of environmental danger everywhere we go... yeah, welcome to Planet Earth. Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Exactly. But as things stand today it's much cheaper for a builder to build to government code and let the owner buy subsidized insurance than it is to build appropriately for possible conditions.

The current program is a disincentive to do exactly what you recommend.

If FedGov said tomorrow "In 5 years, we will no longer offer subsidized flood insurance for new construction" the architects and engineers would have a real financial incentive to get the job done right. As it stands now, the taxpayers are subsidizing those who build in danger zones. We're financing the maintenance of the status quo.