I normally take hurricane season with a grain of salt

[Chainfire]

3. Michael wiped out 75% of the trees on my 30 acre property and I am 75 miles inland.

Tree farms to the immediate West of me had 100% destruction. I have lived in Florida for 68 of my 70 years and I have never seen anything like it. It took nearly a week with a chain saw and truck to cut a drivable path from my house to the street. I worked in Miami after hurricane Andrew and the wind damage was very similar. The only reason that Michael was brief national news is because it mainly hit rural areas, and we don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. One of these storms is going to hit a major metropolitan area in Florida soon. It is almost inevitable, that is why insurance companies are abandoning the state in droves. (Or raising rates to drive the buyers away; the same thing) I have built a "hard room" inside my house as an Alamo position. I just hope that I get better results in my "fortress" than Davy Crocket and Jim Bowie did.

You can build a home to stand up to a major hurricane, but those embedded tornadoes respect no man's construction abilities.

By the way, when you hear people talk about a really bad storm sounding like a train going down the tracks. It is literal. I stepped out on the lee side of my house during the storm for a few seconds, and it sounded just like a freight train rolling down the tracks, with the accompaniment of large trees snapping like toothpicks. It was not a noise that your normally associate with wind, it was a constant roar. I was highly impressed by the power of the storm.