Word: floridas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inventor at Intellectual Ventures, says the proposal would be used only as a last resort - as a "Plan C." But many experts are skeptical of its practicality. "I have a hard time picturing doing this on the magnitude required, but it's an interesting idea," says University of Florida Professor of Geological Sciences Ellen Martin. "It may be easier to just dump a bunch of ice cubes out of an airplane, but it will take a lot of those too." (See pictures of the destruction of Hurricane Gustav...
Hugh Willoughby, acknowledged as the "guru of hurricane modification" and now a professor at Florida International University, dismisses the plan as "junk science." The cost and logistics don't add up, he says, estimating that it would take tens of thousands of the giant tubs put in the water within 24 hours of the storm's arrival. Others think the whole idea of trying to dissipate hurricanes before they start is misguided. Bob Atlas, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami, points out that hurricanes, as devastating as they can be, do serve some good, by helping...
...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...