I would think a lot of the crossed palms would be able to survive winds. It seems whenever a palm is crossed with another palm it becomes more resistant to a lot of things.

Wind speed for a fairly short amount of time ( say a hurricane that blows for 12 hrs. ) is not as bad as wind that blows in duration like the Santa Ana's. Palms that hold up to Hurricanes may not do as well there. With some more thought to the subject, it also depends where in the landscape they are placed. If placed in a fairly sheltered spot, most palms do pretty well. Most trees or palms placed in a open area will go through hell no matter what variety. I saw a  Licuala on Sanibel go through hurricane Charley (130+mph winds) and looked untouched while 100 foot Aus. pines in the backyard were put to the ground. Never know with wind.

I'm away from my copy of "Ornamental Palm Horticulture" by Timothy K. Broschat and Alan W. Meerow, but I think these experienced Floridians didn't like heavy pruning of palms.  Period.  

Miami and some other parts of southeastern Florida have a special problem with shallow or no soil due to limestone rock.  Things can blow over.  I recall visiting a site long used for a plant nursery.  A thriving (if messy and untrimmed) live oak turned out to have been blown over by Andrew.  You'd never know it.  Same goes for many palms at Fairchild.  

The list given by Jerry@treezoo is kind of discouraging.  Wilma was by no means a severe storm in Florida.

Dave-Vero,

Wilma was certainly not a killer like Hugo or Andrew, but it did plenty of damage.  We had gusts over 130mph and lots of tornadoes inside the storm.  We had the storms from 2004 also, and contrary to what some think, previous storms don't get rid of weak palms and trees leaving only the strong.  They weaken even the strong palms and trees so they have a harder time to recover.  You guys in Vero really got nailed in 2004.

BS Man about Palms,

Studies have shown that if you over prune or "hurricane cut" Sabals it actually weakens them in storms.  Palms with skirts like washies would probably benefit from pruning off the dead stuff.  I think pruning what is brown and down, plus coconuts or other seed heads would be fine.  But then you have a lot of large palm debris to get rid of before the storm, not always doable.

Jerry

Here's a report posted at the National Hurricane Center.  Looks like some areas did have category-2 conditions:

"The highest sustained wind measured at an official surface observing site in Florida was a

15-min average speed of 80 kt from a South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) observation site, L006, in Lake Okeechobee. It should be noted that another SFWMD platform, LZ40, located only about 5 n mi north of L006 recorded a 15-min wind speed of 79 kt at the same time. It is reasonable to assume that these measurements correspond to a 1-min average

wind speed of at least 90 kt. A number of official surface wind observation (ASOS) sites in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties stopped reporting data at their highest noted sustained wind speeds, such as Opa-Locka Airport at 74 kt and Pompano Beach Airport at 72 kt. It is likely that higher sustained wind speeds occurred at these sites. Data from the Miami WSR-88D Doppler radar indicated a peak velocity of 138 kt at an elevation of about 5000 ft over western Broward

County. A comparison of Doppler velocities with co-located, official 2-min and 1-min surface wind measurements in Miami-Dade in Broward Counties suggests that the ratios of surface to 4-5000 ft sustained wind velocities over southeastern Florida in Wilma were likely in the range of 0.65 to 0.70. This would result in a maximum surface wind speed estimate of 90-95 kt.

Based on the surface observations and the Doppler data it can be concluded that most of the southeastern Florida peninsula experienced at least category 1 hurricane conditions, and that some parts of northern Miami-Dade County, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties likely had category 2 hurricane conditions, including wind gusts to near 100 kt, at the standard 10 m height

above ground. It is expected that the upper floors of the many high rise buildings in South Florida experienced wind speeds greater than occurred there at 10 m."

" target=_blank">http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/2005atlan.shtml

The comparable for Jeanne (2004):

The observations indicate that a swath of hurricane force sustained winds about 90 n mi wide affected the Florida east coast from near Cape Canaveral southward to near Stuart. The highest wind gust reported from Florida was 111 kt at Fort Pierce Inlet and a 106-kt gust was reported from Vero Beach. Sustained hurricane force winds spread westward and inland about halfway across Florida and tropical storm force winds affected a large portion of the remainder of central Florida.

Frances (2004):

In Florida, an Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) station at Port Mayaca reported sustained winds of 74 kt at 0500 UTC 5 September, while a portable instrumented tower run by the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program (FCMP) at Ft. Pierce reported 70 kt sustained winds at 0402 UTC 5 September along with a peak gust of 94 kt. Unofficial reports include a sustained wind of 70 kt from the Jupiter police department and a gust to 94 kt in Martin County.

The Melbourne National Weather Service website has interesting windswath maps for Frances and Jeanne, but unfortunately not Wilma.

Overall, I worry that people may overestimate what happened to them.  Based on this info, I think we at mainland Vero Beach had almost-but-not-quite Category 2 from both Frances and Jeanne.  At least Jeanne didn't cover my yard with junk.  Frances cleanup took a week, Jeanne just a few hours.   The wind direction in Wilma made it kind of entertaining to watch the weather from the front porch.  The yard suffered very little, except that a neighbor's metal storage shed landed in my heliconia bed.  A bush took most of the hit.