I just wanted to add my response to your unhappiness.

I live in South Orlando, in the path of Charley's eye and the NE quadrant of Frances.

The police and fire units did a remarkable job, at least in our area of the city. They started clearing streets at midnight, less than an hour after Charley blew through. FIREmen and POLICEmen... not treecutters. They went beyond their job description to make it possible for them to access potential emergency areas. As for the contracting, I don't know why they wouldn't allow out-of-state contractors to work, except for the large influx of unisured, unlicensed contractors. Their mistakes and injuries cost our local governments (and ultimately YOU, the taxpayer) a lot of money.

FEMA is there to help out those people who need assistance. You made a point of saying they gave checks to the "uninsured". Keyword = uninsured. Those with insurance have response from a private organization. And it's not as if FEMA abandoned you. Where do you think much of the available ice, water, food, tarps, shovels, chainsaws, etc came from? FEMA brought much of that in, and how much did they charge us for all those thousands of pounds of ice we took from their distribution sites? That's right... nuthin. So we had to go pick it up... Do you expect them to deliver to all 1 million residents of Orange County along with all the residents of the other counties hit?

Two million cubic yards of debris is a lot of stuff to pick up. Ours sat at the end of our yard for a long time, till after Frances. We had to tie it down so it would become flying debris. And yeah, it killed our grass, and yeah, when the men came to pick it up, they scraped up a good portion of our yard doing it, but how much did they charge you for curbside pickup, removal, and dumping? Any fees? Didn't think so.

I have no idea where you got the St. Johns flooding bit from. Every day I turn on the news, they have aerial pictures from the St. Johns seawalls with water sloshing up over them, flooding the streets of Sanford and Deltona. Whatever.

Gas was a pain to find. That one I'll give you. But the Central Florida petroleum distribution site is down here in South Orlando, and every truck that left that site was accompanied by at least one, usually two, law enforcement vehicles, ensuring that the gasoline got to a station near you, for your use, and that no one interfered with the delivery of what little gasoline there was to distribute.

The power companies have done miracles considering that they had to replace hundreds of miles of cables AFTER removing the trees from the lines and poles. They had to replace poles, transformers, jacks, etc. And before your house could get electricity back, they had to get power back to the substations and main transmission lines. And to get us power back quickly, they rigged it with only the essentials, knowing it will take a full year to completely repair the damage. When Frances came through, it didn't take as much damage to pull down what the power company had just duct taped up. And with 2 million people without power from Frances and almost that many from Charley just weeks before, you should be counting your blessings you weren't last.

When you purchase a home, you take on the responsibility for that home. It is not someone elses responsibility to keep the water out, to prop the walls up, to repair your wallpaper, or to fix you roof. There is insurance available to those who wish to have it, and bank loans available to those who don't. There are thousands of structures suffering from roof damage and only so many roofers to fix them. Be patient and use some of those free tarps that FEMA is handing out. They have a lot of people to help and it makes their job harder when there are disgruntled, unappreciative residents. Be grateful you still have a house that needs repair, unlike so many people in the Palm Bay/Jupiter Beach region, Port Charlotte/Punta Gorda region, and Gulf Shores/Pensacola region who would probably be more content having to wait for someone to repair their roof rather than wait for someone to build them a new house because theirs was washed into the ocean.