Well, in the Midwest where we get plenty of flooding from rivers, lakes, and streams, there are now more and more localities that aren't going to get "helped" and rebuilt. Those locales are called a "flood plain" and the definition of which one you are in determines where or if you are allowed to build there. People used to be allowed to move right back in and rebuild, flood after flood, until the US government decided the taxpayers had had enough of subsidizing the lucrative "rebuilding" industries and rewarding people's stupidity for wanting to call a flood plain where their property was wiped out completely every couple of 5-10 years "home".

I'm hoping that will one day be the case with the hurricane locales. When I was in the Outer Banks this summer, looking at all these palatial mansions continuing to be built on what is more a sandbar than an island, all I could do was shake my head, knowing the majority of buildings on the island would be gone in the next 50 years. Maybe even by the end of this year, who knows? Maybe the island will be gone by then too, and moved over a coupla miles or so. That has been the story of the Outer Banks and the "Graveyard of the Atlantic" as the tourista industry loves to call it. It's never made any sense to me to try and sink one's heart's roots down into shifting sands, and making it "forever our home". Seems like lunacy to me.

This summer, we drove over a new inlet created by Isabel last fall. On the island, they were selling as a fundraiser, a calendar with photos, including aerial photos, of the destruction on the islands from that storm. And that was just one storm, which had lessened to a category 2 from a category 5 by the time it hit landfall at the Outer Banks.

The biggest problem with such weather disasters? Have a look see at the NOAA Billion Dollar U.S. Weather Disasters, 1980-2003 website for some interesting insights.