Hi Bob,
Anyone with a mortgage must have home/property insurance, the deductables can be just high enough to make any minor damage an out of pocket expense. As a senior manager in a residential construction company here in the Tampa Bay area we get many, many requests to cover things that are outside the warranty (named storms are not covered by the builder). State law mandates that insurance companies pay for damages due to hurricanes, tropical storms, etc. but when the damage is relatively minor there are some who through either a lack of funds or a lack of willingness to part with their own money come gunning for the builder to pay.
As far as cellars go that is a rare bird in these parts, you might hit a water table just 8 or 10 feet below the surface ground level, we are floating on water here! What many folks do is buy a back up generator to power the house in case of outages. A full power generator (whole house) can be quite expensive but for about $500.00 you can buy one that will keep the lights on and the refrigerator running, no A/C though.
I have a little building in the back of my property (right by the river) that has a/c, a mini fridge, microwave, tv, etc. that my generator can power up, so that is our emergency shelter in case of power outages, some folks have the same kind of set up in the garage.
Back in 2004 when I was building my house we had 3 hurricanes pass through Tampa, the house came through with flying colors, no damages whatsoever. As a matter of fact since the new Florida building codes went into effect in 2002 not one roof has blown off of any house in Florida built after 2002, recently the codes became even tighter making the houses here even more resistant to high wind and rain damage.
Many insurance companies have totally withdrawn from Florida due to not only the frequency of Tropical Storms but also by specious claims and outright fraud on the part of home owners and ethically challenged contractors, we can only hope for this cycle to be done with soon so everyone can catch their collective breath, my first 25 years in Florida were relatively calm, I have come to find out that these weather cycles seem to be in 20 year cycles so I guess we were overdue for some bad times.
Peace,
Joe
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Topic: three yrs since Katrina (Read 8824 times)