Category 5 Hurricane Irma Brings 180-MPH Winds to Bear on Caribbean Islands

Re:Category 5 Hurricane Irma Brings 180-MPH Winds to Bear on... by triangleman on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:01PM (#15178622)

You're thinking of Cuba, who are certainly not noobs at this [1]. West Indies unfortunately are routinely decimated by tropical storms. For instance Hugo in 1989 destroyed almost everything in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, leading to widespread lawlessness until President Bush deployed troops there [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba_Emergency_Response_System

[2] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/hawkeye.htm

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Re:Category 5 Hurricane Irma Brings 180-MPH Winds to Bear on... by cvsh on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:27PM (#15178828)

>You're thinking of Cuba, who are certainly not noobs at this. West Indies unfortunately are routinely decimated by tropical storms.

This isn't really true anymore. For example, 95% of homes on St. Martin were destroyed by Hurricane Luis in 1995, because everyone lived in wooden houses. From that point on, the law mandated concrete buildings, and now all but the very poorest people live in houses impervious to hurricanes.

The exceptions are places like Haiti, where folks are simply too poor to afford basic hurricane mitigation. But where people can prepare, they have prepared.

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Re:Category 5 Hurricane Irma Brings 180-MPH Winds to Bear on... by mchristen on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:20PM (#15178779)

Store owners guarding their stores from the roof w/ AK-47s will do that.

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