Hurricanes are a disastrous thing as we all know. They come and go unexpectantly and cause a great deal of damage putting families and friends at risk. I was not affected from Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita, however I was effected from two Hurricanes in 2004.\r\n \r\nI was 16 years old when the hurricanes came through and did damage to my family\'s house. My family and I were hit by Hurricane Charlie and Hurricane Francis. We didn\'t literally get to experience the hurricanes because I live in New Jersey however my family purchased a house in Florida right in the middle of Orlando to rent out as a time share. Therefore our house took a huge toll from both the hurricanes, not us. We bought the house as part of my dad\'s retirement. He doesn\'t work for a big corporation or anything he basically works by himself almost as if he ran his own business so we invested in buying this house in hopes the value of it would increase and we could sell it when he was ready to retire. But when these hurricanes hit our house it put my family through rough times.\r\n \r\nThe hurricanes basically hit our house back to back, giving us no time to recover from the first one to the second one. Also being that we live 1000 miles away from our house it was extremely hard to go down and fix our house. But both hurricanes did a huge amount of damage to our house. Overall after both hurricanes we had pieces of our roof missing, a palm tree that wrecked one area of the house, a destroyed screen from our screened in pool, a partially damaged in ground pool, and flooding. We have a retention pond 10 yards away from our house. This retention pond filled up and flooded two bedrooms and a bathroom. We had to replace both carpets in the bedrooms and all the furniture in the rooms except the bed and also fix one of the walls because the water made it weak and flimsy. \r\n \r\nWhen these hurricanes hit our house we didn\'t know what to do. It was my father\'s retirement money and in the matter of hours form these storms it was basically gone. You might be thinking well doesn\'t your insurance cover these things. Well in Florida because hurricanes are a normal thing the owners of the house have to pay 10% of the house value before the insurance picks any of it up. Our house is valued at about 200,000 dollars, therefore meaning we would have to lay out the first 20,000 dollars, and trust me we don\'t just have 20,000 dollars lying around in our back pocket. But like I was saying we didn\'t no what to do. Both of my parents had jobs and they couldn\'t just take off from work to go fix our house or they would lose money. Likewise we don\'t have casual spending money lying around to just fly down to Florida and then stay in a hotel the whole time while we are there. It was a huge struggling for my family after these hurricanes hit. We had to sacrifice certain things which made times really hard. However over time we eventually got through all of it and were eventually able to fix our house but it was one of the roughest times my family and I had ever been through. We had to front all the money for the house, spend time and money on getting there, and also we lost thousands of dollars from renters that we had to turn down or give money back to because we didn\'t have a house for them to stay in anymore.\r\n \r\nThese two hurricanes my family went through were only minor compared to Katrina and Rita. They didn\'t do nearly as much damage and weren\'t nearly as strong and disastrous as Katrina and Rita. I can only empathize with those of you who did experience and were affected by these horrible storms and can only hope that your lives are back on track now.\r\n