Hurricane Harvey AAR

[Mortblanc]

Another thing I need to mention is that in the U.S. a "mandatory evacuation" does not mean you really have to leave! They do not search from house to house forcing people onto buses and shipping them to a refugee center.

It is an announcement the authorities use to cover their liability during the disaster. They do not care if you stay, just don't blame them when you wake up in OZ walking a yellow brick road with some girl named Dorthy.

Fact is that most of the officials are in storm shelters waiting out the storm on the spot. They want to be present for the immediate photo opps and on the spot interviews as soon as the water recedes and the wind stops.

Many people ignore the "orders" and stay to protect their property.

And there is the aspect that most of the time the weather service exaggerates the storms power. the present tracking information has the storm making landfall as a cat 4 on empty beaches, decreasing to cat 3 half way up the coast, and down to cat 2 by the time it reaches the northern population centers. The numbers that have evacuated from the northern areas is very low.

Lots of stuff is going to get blown away and damaged and there will be thousands of vehicles flooded and damaged beyond repair (hundreds of thousands of "flood cars" will hit the used car lots all over the nation. they will smell like mold forever). Houses will need rehab and all that.

On the other side of the coin, the two hurricanes in succession are creating the largest boom in the building industry in the past 10 years! Construction crews will be busy rebuilding Texas and Florida for the next year.

This is unlike Katrina where they simply walked away from their largely uninsured, low value properties and never rebuilt huge areas of New Orleans, allowing nature to reclaim those areas. Florida and Texas will be rebuilt!

Billions will be spent on repairs and huge chunks of the physical money reserves held by the insurance companies will have to be released into the economy. Every sheet of plywood, panel of dry wall and every hot water heater in the U.S. is headed to one of those two areas as we speak.

Just imagine how many nails it will take to rebuild the two areas. How may compressors, generators and power tools will be bought or replaced.

As I said in another post when dealing with Harvey. Most of the U.S. coastal areas count the age of their homes to the last huge hurricane that wiped everything out. They lived in the old house for bla..bla..bla.. and built the new place after Irma hit...

It is the life they live in our coastal areas.