360 Degrees: Hurricane Ike Strikes Galveston

How can someone not loose faith in God after a natural disaster like Hurricane Ike just diminished their home? In the first place, I think in order to fully understand this question, we must first blame ourselves for the disasters that Hurricane Ike caused. Usually human nature consists of people learning from their mistakes in the past and growing from them, but then if this statement is true, why haven't we taken note from Hurricane Katrina? Why haven't we payed attention more to these "natural" disasters? Why haven't we built built things or done things to prevent this devastation? The answer, I believe, is that we (our government too) were too busy with intervening in other people's affairs around the world instead of looking in our own front yard and helping OUR people. The US is always trying to make themselves useful in other countries affairs and then this is what happens to us. But most importantly, it seems like the US is good at one thing and one thing only; procrastinating.
But now I'm back to the question what does this have to do with God? Of course, for the religious people in Galveston, of which there are many, it has everything to do with God. Not only do they believe that God made this "natural" disaster happen as a punishment for something they have done, but from this , the people of Galveston, just like this old woman in the picture above ,are going to take this punishment and make the best of it. I believe that they are going to believe that God did this for their own good. They are going to believe that although God did cause this, God will fix it in the end.
On the other hand, I think that there are people who suffered from this hurricane that lost complete faith in humanity as a whole and simply turned to God for answers. I believe there are at least some people that did this because I know for a fact that if something like this happened to me and no one tried to help or prevent it most importantly, I would definitely loose faith in people.
This whole concept of God leads me to ask the question, why are the southerners so different from most of us up north? There are many answers to that I believe, but the main one is religion. Up here, although most of us belong to some church or religious institution, there is no way that we actually base our lives off of this like the people in the South do. I may be wrong, but in 2003 I was in Galveston visiting some family and all I remember thinking is, "Wow, these people are crazy religious fanatics". Everyone I talked to and almost every place I went to seemed to reflect a religious view. Galveston is a place full of hope and full of optimists. In my opinion, it is probably one of the few places in the US that can actually get hit by a disaster like this and still have hope and faith in God.
But if this is true, then why don't the people up North praise God as religiously as the people in the South do? Is it because we are too busy running around doing useless things when in reality the only thing that matters is God? Or is the opposite; Is it that we truly do know what we are doing and God is not our main priority because we believe that God has no say on our future and that these "natural" disasters are simply natural disasters? What I am really curious about knowing is that if the North were to suffer from something like this, would the people still be saying this? What would the people in the North think of God then? IF it were to happen to us in the North, could we suddenly become aware of God? Fortunately for us, nothing like this has happened-yet-and hopefully won't happen anytime in the near future. The one thing that I can say about the people who suffered tremendous losses from this hurricane is that they deserve to believe in something because humanity is not always dependable and in the end I think that they are the lucky ones because they are the ones who actually have faith in something, whereas the rest of us aren't even lucky enough to have faith in ourselves most of the time.