Hurricane Sandy

"If Mother Gaia did this to get back at the Deniers, then she did so by destroying billions of dollars’ worth of property belonging to people who do BELIEVE IN CLIMATE CHANGE! New York, and D.C.; these are the places striving to reduce humanity's carbon footprint!" --Michael Mooron

Yup.People build 50 feet from the ocean,on so called barrier dots of land,and on flood plains,then bitch when the inevitable happens.I hate insurance companies,but must admit I am glad they still consider this damage "acts of God".Why should idjits be paid for making stupid choices?

If this continues, it will soon end up looking like Detroit.

Hey Justthinkin, Where I come from, insurance companies don't have to and won't insure anybody who lives/builds on a flood plain. Because, DUH, flood plain! This is one big difference between Canada and The U.S.

The reason they do so in the US is the very generous disaster relief provisions and flood reinsurance that the US govt offers to those living on floodplains and coastlines.

We get similar issues with people on the prairies who build right next to the pretty river bank, without realizing that rivers actually move. When the bank starts eroding, the provincial government seems compelled to spend millions of dollars to stabilize it. Similarly, cottage owners on the shores of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba appear shocked and amazed when ice floes push up in the spring and destroy their cabins.

While I'm currently staying on a geologically unstable sandbar with the ocean about 100' away, this is the type of place I'd visit but not buy. It's nice to wake up every morning and see the sun rising over the ocean but it's only a matter of time before a hurricane rearranges the coastline in this area.

Wherever I've lived, the first thing I've done is to look for someplace high above the nearest river. It probably came from my father, who would look at geologic maps and historical flood records before relocating the family. We lived in one of the highest places in Winnipeg when the Red River flooded in the 1960's. I figure I can always walk down to the riverbank, or the edge of the floodplain when the river has overflowed its banks.

It wouldn't surprise me if CAGW was blamed for the damage in NY and related areas as it's a lot easier to blame something else rather than ones own stupidity.

"Yeah,Sandy was a "big'un", but if you scrutinize WHERE the damage is, once you got out of the immediate coast line/estuaries, and some riverine floodplains the damage is just the usual "tree falls over in high wind" stuff, actually not much of anything unusual, just the normal, tedious fix the lines exercise writ large.

All the serious damage is flooding and storm surge related.

Now to a certain extent you can't help but build in those places and thus you just assume this crap is going to happen, but I was *amazed* to see cars parked in underground parking garages in lower Manhattan. Seriously, you have a car in Manhattan and you couldn't think through and be bothered to move your chariot to a midtown parking tower for the storm?

It's already happening Loki.Heard on the radio yesterday that some earth muffin radical (didn't catch the name) is demanding that we all owe an apology to Gore because he told us that this sort of thing was going to happen and we ignored his advice.

In my NOTW (neck of the woods) there are several lowland flood plains that have sat mostly fallow throughout the past hundred years or so. But over the past 10-15 years folks have taken to developing a few of these inherently dangerous locations and 3 years ago all of them were all but wiped out by a serious flood. The insurance companies were saved any expense as they had years before notified these twits that they were on a floodplain and they would NOT be covered in the event of a flood. But the provincial government, for patently political reasons, coughed up the cash to rebuild all but one of them. Isn't that special? They got free property insurance compliments of BC taxpayers. They also got a fancy new dyke built -- again at taxpayers expense -- but it only "protects" 5 kms of riverbank! The river can simply overflow it's banks above where the the dyke starts and here we go again! Now they are demanding a tax to pay for the dyke upkeep. This is how government "works".

Toronto learned its lesson from Hurricane Hazel and the deaths and destruction to those who built on the flood plains of our rivers. So far no one is building on the flood plains but the Don River routinely overflows during storms of average intensity and I am sure with impact the structures being erected on the Don Lands.

I have a good friend who was the executive VP for a major US insurance company and has told me they will not insure those in dangerous areas but the US government with its disaster relief allows the stupidity to continue. New Orleans is the perfect example.

The real problem is people who do not make their structures conform with the nature of the risks to be found at the site they choose.

Drive through southwest Louisiana, and you will see many homes on stilts or pilings, so that when the periodic floods occur, the house itself is undamaged, although the car parked beneath it may be drowned.

If you choose to live in an area with seismic risk, then your home should be built at least such that it won't fall on your head and kill you, if building to be completely quake-proof is impossible.

I saw the pics of the cars in the underground parking, floating to the surface. Amid a nice scum of oil and gasoline.

phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2012/10/will-hurricane-sandy-help-obama-he.html

Do you think the -idiots- who owned those cars would have moved them if the city charged them for the toxic waste cleanup? They only had DAYS to do it, after all.

Vacation homes along the Atlantic coastline get wiped away about once every five years on average. Sooner or later a storm comes along and takes 'em all out. A week later, no matter the location, crews are busy putting up new ones in the same place, built exactly the same way as the old ones.

If a guy wants to spend his money that way, I'm all for it. If he wants to spend MY money that way, that's different. Currently, (if I were an American) its my money they're spending.

Loki said: "Wherever I've lived, the first thing I've done is to look for someplace high above the nearest river."

You would think that would be the obvious thing to do, right? Its what I do, when I move. Find out where the floodplains are, find out the average tornado pathways, where the crime hotspots are, where the railway and the toxic product factories are. Scope the neighborhood for uncut lawns and busted cars on blocks. Find the water mains and storm sewer mains. Don't live next to them!

I get a house on the highest available spot that meets all criteria. I make sure I can move all my valuable crap if I have to. Therefore big truck and trailer in the driveway.

I've been flooded once, rented house where the dish washing machine water supply broke and filled the basement with a foot of water overnight. Total damage, some old magazines I'd been saving for no good reason. Because being a nasty suspicious sort I didn't put all my storage stuff in the basement, duh! I put it in a ground floor room away from the kitchen and the bathroom. Because plumbing breaks can -fill- a basement in 24 hours.

Meanwhile these New York morons leave a $60,000 SUV in a parking garage that's -below- seal level during the most hyped storm in the history of hype.

"LET them die!" James T. Kirk, Star Trek VI.

By the location, location, mother nature criteria I'm surprised that anyone would live in Delise, or any town in the flat lands where tornados roam with the deer and antelope. Tell that to the folks in Wawa Ontario who were at a great elevation above Lake Superior but still got washed off the hillside when ma nature dumped a sh*t load of rain.
Remember, most of the habitation along the world's coastlines has evolved from trade/travel and fishing or farming of the sea. Heck, even today most of Newfoundland's communities are only accessible by sea.

On the bright side, Krugman is happy.