Anyone here being effected by hurricane Florence?

The more "quaint" an area is, usually the quicker they recover. Or that used to be the case. Rockport Texas is really taking long time recovering from Harvey, but from the activity there, in another year you would never know that it happened. These places on the Carolina coast have certainly been through this before. Just not that many people in the past. Not everyone is cut out to live on the ocean. Yes, it is beautiful most of the time, but it is always dangerous.
Out of the 45k people who lost their homes in Houston last year, only about 8k are still rebuilding. Not that noticeable in an area of 5.5 million people. The biggest thing you notice is that they are widening and deepening all the creeks, bayous and rivers. They are dredging a billion tons of sand from the San Jacinto River that runs by my house. Quite a few years late, though.

I am grateful that the wind wasn't any worse. In Texas we used to have the "Big Thicket". It was a stretch of National Forest that was so dense that it was said that if a person wandered 6 feet off the trail, they would never find their way out. Hurricane Rita flattened it from just north of Port Arthur to just south of Nacogdoches, about a 120 miles. I would hate to see that happen to the beautiful forests of the Carolinas.