Word: florida
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...good" news is that the worst of the problem is fairly concentrated geographically. Places where house prices have fallen the most have been hit the worst. That includes states that saw the wildest speculation and overbuilding - like California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada - and those that have been gutted the worst economically, such as Ohio and Michigan...
...supersensitivity to odors (some states allow scent evidence only from bloodhounds to be admitted). But even the best-trained scent dog - and Hess says the dogs require constant training - can make mistakes. "They are fallible, just like a person," says Charles Mesloh, a former canine officer and criminologist at Florida Gulf Coast University...
...storms can't be warded off, the state is also looking to ways of responding to them more efficiently. Florida's top emergency manager has floated a novel idea to turn the housing crash into an advantage, by using 250,000 foreclosed homes as temporary hurricane shelters. "This option didn't exist two or three years ago before the real-estate market crashed," Ruben Almaguer, interim director of Florida's emergency management division, told the Miami Herald last month following a mock-disaster drill that highlighted the shortage of hurricane shelters in the state. "We can't not look...
...proposal isn't getting much support. Richard Shuster, a Miami attorney who writes the Florida Foreclosure Defense blog, notes that foreclosed properties are often uninhabitable. "Homeowners in foreclosure or thieves after foreclosure often strip homes of appliances, fixtures, air conditioners, and anything else of value, including hurricane shutters," he says. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not considering such a measure. "Under FEMA's mission of sheltering disaster survivors, this is not an option that we would utilize," agency spokesman Clark Stevens says...
...Florida has had a standby plan for one-way evacuations since 1994, but it has yet to make the idea a priority. Officials prefer to execute staged evacuations, first with tourists and trailer park residents and then with outlying beach communities, so that the evacuation is orderly and traffic continues to flow, says Jennifer Olson, chief operating officer of Florida?s Turnpike Enterprise...