Waiting For Hurricane X

Anyone trying to recover in the wake of last week's visit by Hurricane Bonnie probably isn't feeling especially lucky at the moment. Good fortune isn't the first thing you think of when your living room is full of mud, your roof is missing, your power has been out for days on end. But considering the destruction that often accompanies storms of this magnitude, residents of North and South Carolina and Virginia got off remarkably lightly. Only three people died. Property damage was far lower than it might have been. Beaches remained largely intact.

If anything, the storm reinforced the popular belief...