The Official Tropical Storm Arlene Thread

[Excalibur2004]

Simple: Japanese live in houses made of stone, and Floridians live in trailor parks . Ok, maybe that's a bit too prejudiced, but the fact of the matter is, wood is still the preferred building material, whereas in most other parts of the western world concrete&stones are preferred. If you look at pictures of damaged or destroyed houses, most of those were made of wood.

you have a point! there are a lot of trailer parks here, but most of the time the media visits the most F'd up area and 99.999% of the time someones double-wide is wrapped around a telephone pole. But seriously there are a lot of cheaply made homes here simply because the builders didn't ever forsee such disasters hitting multiple times. grant you they ARE southern builders and don't notice such things as having ocean on three sides .

Also japanese folks are WAY smarter!

[Foxtrot]

Re:

If you build your house right on the beach in a hurricane prone area, you probably deserve to get hit by one.

Foxtrot

[srbmod]

Now not all prefab homes are of the mobile home variety. Japan is a leader in some areas of prefab home designs, and there are several companies out in California that design prefab homes that are not only nice looking, but are environmentally friendly, and able to survive earthquakes. In the Caribbean, shipping crates (you know those trailer sized ones used on container ships) are being reused as housing and other building uses. The shipping crates are made out of some pretty strong material that makes the stuff used to built mobile homes seem like paper.

http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm

[mikecweb]

Flew through the outer band of this one down from jacksonville.

Joe to answer your question if you think about it maybe in some of the worst hurricanes we have now 15-20 people die and they are usually from running their generator inside or getting in car accidents. So we jus make a bigger deal of it because the media needs something to talk about and yes they go to the worst areas and most of the time they are the trailer parks.

[Greg J.]

How nice of them to name it after my ex-wife.

[FlyingPhotog]

If you build your house right on the beach in a hurricane prone area, you probably deserve to get hit by one.

Foxtrot

Same goes for those who build in areas prone to tornadoes!