Has any news agencies been reporting causaulties yet? I hope there are none, but know we really haven't touched the surface, as what happened in the wake of Andrew.

We are still early on in the game, and this is really far from over, but I can see Katrina eventually overtaking Andrew as the most expensive hurricane on record. In lieu of astonishing devastation in an extremely isolated area (ie Andrew, Charley), Katrina boasts of a more moderated destruction (at least from what we have seen thus far… which is liable to change), but over an extraordinarily large area. Granted… when you are talking about storm surge levels of the kind being thrown around here, you see a different kind of damage than seen in an otherwise exclusively extreme wind event. Due to the incredibly large area of destruction with this storm, look to see fatalities (especially indirect fatalities) skyrocket in the coming days. You know you have a serious problem when a “minimal” hurricane causes several billion dollars in damage over South Florida like Katrina did last week. These things are becoming way too expensive.

Of course, this is only conjecture.