gatorbabe79 wrote:I am in Jacksonville and had to go out on an errand. The damage is unbelievable, so many trees down, widespread flooding, the river is overrunning its banks, there are 77,000 customers in Duval county alone without power. This is as bad as any recent "real" hurricane I've seen in north Florida. My boathouse has collapsed, my dock is breaking up and floating away, and I am on the east shore of the ST Johns river, where the wind was not direct. We are still having intermittent rain and wind and several Tornado warnings have just been issued. So please don't take these mild little tropical storms lightly. This place is a disaster.
This is what is scary to me. If a tropical storm could produce the damage gatorbabe79 observed, just imagine what a full-fledged major hurricane could do to the same region. Or Melbourne - as devastating as the flooding was, and it was mind-boggling! - imagine if it had been accompanied by 130mph+ winds.
I'm not one of the "it's only a tropical storm" people. As was pointed out, Fay caused quite a number of deaths across the Caribbean, in addition to the deaths in the U.S. But for a tropical storm to do this much damage, I think we need to look at measures we should take to prevent even worse from occurring in a major hurricane.
Everyone focuses on building standards, but that's not the whole problem. Can storm-water drainage be improved to cope with street flooding? Is it possible, I don't know. Why are large, unstable trees planted in residential lots, some are "protected" because they're native but they're a complete disaster in hurricanes. So much damage done by laurel oaks falling on homes that otherwise might have made it through, yet municipalities continue to encourage planting them - why?!! And this is one thing that is EASY to fix! but no one addresses this, regardless of the constant unnecessary damage done every hurricane season.
