My wife and daughter have spent the last week in New Orleans visiting her parents. They have lived down there for about 7 years due to my father in law being relocated to work in aerospace down there. If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you might recall that I blogged a bit about my inlaws experience through the hurricane. My mother in law even had a very large “write up” in one of our local papers here in the Seattle area. They still have a home here that they rent out and still consider themselves locals, even though they’ve been down there for 7 years. They opted to evacuate a couple days before hurricane katrina hit. It was about 3 months before they got to go back to their house and survey the damage. They were extremely lucky in that their home didn’t flood. It sits a couple blocks outside the french quarter and was on some of the highest ground. Amazingly, only a couple blocks away, houses were flooded. They had a roof leak from the hurricane, lost some siding and their refrigerator was destroyed from all of the food liquifying and going bad in there over the 3 months they were away. My father in law took the fridge out of the house, cleaned it from top to bottom with bleach, pressure washed it and used just about every other cleaner known to man. It sparkled. As soon as he closed the door for about 5 seconds, all the terrible smells of the fridge returned. There was no saving it. They put it on the sidewalk in front of their house, just like thousands of others did. One day a man came by and took it away. Besides the fridge, they ended up getting a new roof put on, some new siding, and had the house repainted. (well, actually it’s being done now). So, enough about the history of their situation. Needless to say, they were one of the lucky ones. They now have all of their utilities, although the power goes off much more often than it ever did before. They even have high speed internet access again. If you sit inside their house, you’d forget about all of the destruction that remains.
My wife has taken photos while she’s been down there. She has emailed a few and will bring back many more. We’ve talked a lot on the phone while she’s been down there and she just keeps saying over and over that it’s bad. All these months later, many parts of the city are still deserted wastelands. One picture she sent showed a few different street signs. They all leaned at about the same angle, obviously blown that way from the powerful winds.  Businesses are closed all over. Piles and piles of junk sit everywhere. She talked about how overcome with emotion she was as they drove by a house that had been destroyed and there was a family sitting on the porch in the 90+ degree humid heat. There was a little girl sitting with her family who was about the same age as our daughter. The only difference between them is the complete loss of everything that little girl’s family had experienced. It really caused my wife to reflect on how lucky we were and how terribly bad she feels for all those families down there.
We don’t stand much chance of a major hurricane near our home and flooding would be pretty much out of the question since we live up high. Earthquakes are the natural disaster that are always threatening us. We had an earthquake about 5 years ago that shook a lot of things, but we didn’t sustain any major damage at our home. All the experts claim we are due for a big one. With all the disaster talk in New Orleans and the gulf states I decided to look in to earthquake insurance. Roughly 50% of our net worth is wrapped up in home equity. A major earthquake would set us back significantly, especially if our house was destroyed. So, just a couple days ago, I purchased earthquake insurance for our home. It will only pay out if there is major damage and the deductible is quite high. My only expectation from the policy is to keep us from losing our home and all of it’s contents. It’s going to cost us a few hundred dollars a year, but I think that it’s a good decision. I’ve had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for quite some time. Now, at least I know that if the big one does hit, while it will be a huge impact to us, at least we’ll have a safety net.