re: #140 iossarian

Interesting study.

We live in Northern NJ, so tornado damage isn’t a priority (though we’ve had our share of severe weather in recent years). The housing stock is generally much older, and my home - which we bought knowing it wasn’t in a flood zone, was built in 1928. For us, it’s flood risk, and we bought a home outside a flood zone. We had looked at homes that would have required flood insurance, but decided against buying there because of flood potential. In fact, we had a deal fall through after a noreaster hit and left that potential home’s basement flooded out even though it was outside a flood zone. Don’t want to deal with that kind of mess.

I’m probably going to reinforce the roof over the next couple of years, but we also cut down one of the huge trees on the property to prevent it from coming down on the house in bad weather. We think that had it been up during Sandy, we probably would have looked at a total loss if it came down (or massive losses to our neighbors if it went down on their house instead).