Northern Exposure/Southern Exposé

We survived Tropical Storm Irma. The extent of our hardship was being without power for 19 hours and then a weekend of picking up small limbs and debris. I was texting with my mother, who splits her time these days between my childhood home in Michigan and their retirement community in Florida, who noted that, in Michigan, the electrical utilities were much better prepared for outages. My first reaction was that this was an unfair assessment, but on second thought, she might be on to something. Is it possible that there is a more healthy respect for weather in the North because of winter snow? Does the constant threat of lake-effect snow eliminate hubris?