anything but the ice cream...

That photo of Rusty's place is almost unbelievable! "Somebody" got the engineering right on that one! (Why am I not surprised?)

Whenever I get irritated with 4 feet of snow etc in Michigan I remind myself that at least we don't get annual coastal tropical storms. I can leave for the winter and at least expect to have a home when I return!

... if you can find it under the snowdrifts

In 1971 we moved to Port Charlotte, Fl. and rented a house which one year later we bought.
Several years later I started to remodel one area of the house and found the house to be an "early hurricane house".
The house was built in 1956/58 and every wall is concrete block and many filled with concrete.
It was a flat roof so I later put on a 4/12 pitch roof over the flat roof. Did not really think about that too much until "Charley" hit out area. At one time the wind gust peaked at the airport at 200mph and while Charley was going on a tornando hit just about three blocks from our house.
The house stood strong even tho we lost many shingles, facia/soffet. It was nice to know we had solid block interior & exterior walls and a roof over a roof.
The damage around us with-in one block included one house leveled, two without most of their roofs and one with the roof that blew off and landed in the yard behind us.
We were with-out power for 21 days and we just moved into the motor home to enjoy the generator and the AC, plus I ran the phone line into the Barth and had phone service using a old dial/push button phone (they work off the low voltage in the phone lines).
We lost our business and our airplane, both our cars and the Barth were damaged but the house stood strong. We considered ourselves very blessed.
My only concern was our house sits only 7 foot above sea level.
We had no leaks in the Barth even tho the twister raised the left side off the ground about a foot. It had a full 100 gallons of diesel, 40 gallons of gas and full fresh water which was probably a good thing. YES- those Barths are built TUFF.

Jim & Barb