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by peterwwillis 2984 days ago
Depends on whether you're in a flood zone. A lot of Florida isn't in flood zones, so storm surge isn't a cause for most of the damage there, it's trees and wind and debris. However, flood zones around the world are growing.
1 comments

You don't need to be in a flood zone to be impacted by a storm surge. You just have to live within ~30ft of sea level. The majority of the gulf coast is pretty flat. Flood-zone maps do get redrawn after every major hurricane, but that's not so much a matter of climate change so much as exactly where the storm hits. Places that have never flooded in a hundred years will flood if a hurricane makes land in the right place, simply because it pushes a couple dozen feet of water ahead of it.

Debris doesn't cause a lot of damage, particularly if you've prepped for the hurricane (by boarding up windows, garaging cars, etc.) The biggest factors are definitely trees and storm surge.