When I lived on Maui we had a bad hurricane. Trees down everywhere, power out for weeks. One father was killed when he crawled under the family home to fix something and the storm blew the house down on him. Being from the East coast, I had zero previous experience with tropical storms. That was the only really bad hurricane we had in 12 years on Maui.
Now living in the South, we have had lots of storms hit our coastline, but we are in the center of the state. Only Katrina was bad enough that it came all the way up here, 4 hours drive from the coast! It wrecked a ton of stuff in Mississippi, including wiping out the Biloxi coastline, but all the publicity went to New Orleans and what was happening there.
Some times we get wind storms here (Mississippi) that are really dangerous, since the majority of our state is forested. We live in a forest. We have huge indigenous trees, but those high winds can snap them in half, or uproot them. If they fall on power live wires, they can spark fires.