Manhattan Gets Ready for Hurricane Irene

This has been a tough week for the Northeast; one quake and now some heavy rain.    I'm sitting in sunny, cool Berkeley reading posts such as this one and looking at flood maps such as the one below.



I would be shocked if this hurricane causes deaths in the Northeast.  The early warning system has alerted people to take this storm seriously and the wealth of the U.S allows us to afford a building stock that can take a punch.   Of course, there is a lot of property located on the Northeast coast and I'm sure that many of these homes and structures are made out of inferior materials.

If this storm does cause significant property damage, then the people of the East Coast will have to take a close look at why this took place.  What types of building materials couldn't take the punch?  Why did people use such materials?  Will they continue to use such materials to rebuild after they learn that tough storms can cause damage.  The silver lining of these shocks is that we learn about what are the weak spots in our defenses and this "wake up" call alerts people to how they must invest to play better defense against Mother Nature.  We choose how much damage natural disasters cause by where we choose to live and how we live.