Ok, I’m going to add in experience here because the house survived without damage while others in the neighborhood did not. Here.
Water projections are for a very specific range of flooding that doesn’t really spread wide like we think. The barometric pressure and wind is what is causing a bowing in the water that rises higher in a centralized area, so when you call for 20 ft storm surges, you’re talking about Central-East or Central-South of the eye, while the North/West is pulling water out via wind, despite the bubble from pressure. And that height only stays that high for a certain distance inland. This is why my area which is 6ft higher than sea level NEVER gets flooded from just a storm surge. (One day it may, not knocking it, but we are the high end and have a lot of land between us and the storm. The rest of the area is going to flood really bad, to take us out with surge.)
So, when I leave for a storm, I specifically leave for wind damage, not flooding.
Wind damage has a habit of finding a piece of the roof and peeling it back like taking a sticker tag off a product at a store. So it peels back in clumps and stops when it hits an area that is holding. Unfortunately, under the shingles is long sheets of tar paper, and once that’s exposed, most all your rain protection is coming off.
So, if you only get the wind peeling, not the storm surge, nor the trees falling on houses, it’s feasible that this would actually work.
My thing is that if the water table rises (that was more the case with Helene, inland), the bulk of a tree’s anchoring roots are close to the surface, so when the rain floods to the level of the grass, it takes very little wind to tip them over. Likewise, my concern is those straps aren’t any further down than the tree’s roots–if the whole tree is coming up, those straps won’t work. If the tree snaps from winds alone and lands on that roof, it wouldn’t affect the straps, but the house is damaged enough to now catch on the wind a bit more…so I see it as possibly useless to try, even if it worked enough this time…that’s if it really worked. The debate can stay skeptical on that, with good reason.
Most the prep is for wind damage and minor flooding. Catastrophic is impossible to fully prepare for. They are why you carry an axe into your attic, so you don’t die if you gambled wrong.