AP Pinpoints 5 Vulnerable Hurricane Areas

Just because Katrina was the perfect storm (AP) -- a catastrophic combo of the wrong hurricane in the wrong place at the wrong time - doesn't mean that history can't repeat itself, leaving another city obliterated by another tempest. It can.

And as we enter what weather prognosticators are euphemistically calling another "active season," citizens and civil servants from Texas to New England are asking themselves: Where's the next New Orleans?

The Associated Press has pinpointed five of the most vulnerable U.S. coastal spots.

Among them: Galveston, Texas, sitting uneasily by the Gulf of Mexico, its residents limited to a single evacuation route; Miami, full of elderly people and others who might be trapped; and New York City, long spared a major storm but susceptible to a calamity of submerged subways and refugees caught in horrendous traffic jams.

My parent's house was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in '92, and I was down there soon after. Homestead was a very suburban city, houses with big lots and a good deal of open space. Trying to imagine the kind of damage I saw then on a much more dense population is impossible.

The condos and high rises that would have to be evacuated?

The elderly and fixed income people crammed into those condos and high rises?

We're not ready at all.