Tornado warnings are very different from Hurricane warnings because the areas destroyed by a tornado are quite narrow. Tornadoes arrive with little notice and often dissipate in a relatively short time. And few people that live in an area that is under a particular tornado warning will actually have their home destroyed and suffer any injury. The science behind a tornado warning is still not exact, but the weather service simply does its best to warn people of a possible catastrophic event.
Hurricane warnings come days in advance and offer most people plenty of time to get out of harms way.
Do posters feel differently about rescuing those who ignored warnings and stayed behind than they do about those who have skied off path and into trouble, or ignored warnings about climbing in a certain area/season and have gotten stuck?
When there are clear warnings such as “Danger - Do Not Leave The Path - Unstable Terrain” or whatever, I think a two-pronged approach is right: rescue them, and immediately detain them until they’ve paid the full cost of the rescue.
These are (to me anyway) FAR more clear-cut than forcing someone out of their own home. People who ski off the path or get in trouble climbing have already made the choice to take the risks just for fun, and there’s no issue over separating them from their security and their possessions.
I cannot see how someone might ski off a path or climb in an unstable area because of lack of resources. Isn’t most skiing on private land? Then who would be responsible for paying, and how well the dangerous areas must be marked are other concerns.
I’m a bit less sympathetic to people who don’t have the good sense to stay inside with a good book, enjoying nature through a window, than people who are in the way of a natural disaster through no fault of their own.
The op specified those that choose to ignore the warnings/mandatory orders and decide to “ride out the storm.”
These are people who may have what they think are good reasons to ignore the warnings that they think is better judgement than what they are being told.
Rescuing those who are trapped by no reckless decision making of their own was not the op.
To my read those who choose to stay and ride out a storm in the face of a “mandatory” evacuation are worse than the mountain climbers and skiers who take risks as those who are rescuing them are at the moment a resource in very limited supply in the face of a great demand. The time and energy spent rescuing them from their stupid choice is time and energy they do not have providing other desperately needed recovery service, maybe time and energy not spent helping someone who had no resources and no choice.
But I would not leave the reckless mountain climbers to die either. I’d just resent their selfishness.
I would propose that a conscious choice to ignore mandatory evacuation orders be considered a crime and that some jail time is indicated for their reckless disregard of the safety and needs of others that their action has caused.
It’s an interesting conundrum. I’m one of the non-evacuees. In my semi-rural - not for much longer - South Carolina town I’d say not one person in ten evacuated. We’re about 35 miles from the coast northwest of Charleston. I’ve only been here eight years or so but even I knew the governor issued his evacuation order too early to get anyone to take it seriously. He’s just playing it safe because he has an election in six or seven weeks and he’s a replacement governor who would like to be an elected governor.
But this is a fairly mixed area. Some people, like me, could go if we wanted. But there are a LOT of people - my cleaning woman, for one - who couldn’t get out if you spotted her the car and the gas. Four kids, deadbeat ex husband, lives out in the woods somewhere near the lake. I stayed because I ran the odds in my head - chance of a hit, chance of flood and so forth - she stayed because her options are truly limited.
It really comes down - as so many things do - to the fact that humans are very bad at assessing risk and are prone to being influenced by outsiders. For every person accused of being influenced to stay by social media there’s a lot more being influenced by the fearmongers on the weather channel and its equivalent. Yes, people were harmed and died and needed rescue. But we’ll never hear about the ones who were harmed and died because they evacuated. We’ll also never connect a real cost - lost wages, lost productivity, theft, vandalism and such and compare it with a normal week. Hell, my kid missed a week of school. She’s going to have to make that up, almost certainly during Spring Break. And that’s also lost opportunity. Vacations planned for that time, outside activities and so forth. There’s an economic cost as well as a human cost and those add up.
Hurricanes kills, yes. But so does stress, economic, fear and otherwise.
People that ignore a MANDATORY evacuation order, and then need rescuing?
Charge them with one misdemeanor for ignoring the legal instruction, and BILL them the exact cost of the rescue.
If a rescuer dies in the process of rescuing them, charge them with Felony-murder. After all, they knowingly committed a crime, which lead to the death of a person.
It’s up to each state to determine what the penalties (if any) are for not complying to mandatory evacuation orders. For example Florida, a veteran of natural disasters and forced/voluntary evacs, has no legal penalty for non-compliance with the mandatory orders. Even the states that do penalize the act, including South Carolina, do so only to the extent of misdemeanors, usually in the form of fines. That hardly qualifies for inclusion in the Felony Murder umbrella.
Is full compliance even possible, let alone desirable? Like, I saw a story saying that there were a million people in the evacuation zones in South Carolina. Would it really have been a good thing if they all tried to leave? I’m thinking that things would break down pretty quickly (possibly in a catastrophic way) if a mandatory evacuation was actually treated as mandatory by the residents. In that case, it would be pretty twisted to punish the people who stayed. It would be like punishing third class passengers for having to get fished out of the water after the Titanic sank.
And giving a blanket evacuation order to everyone is an example of “equal but unfair” in that it leaves no recourse for those who lack the means to evacuate but to break the law. It’s reminiscent of our traffic laws.
I still take issue with the notion that ignoring a mandatory evacuation order is reprehensible, or even stupid. For some in the evacuation zone, not leaving is probably stupid. If you are fortunate enough to have a first-fourth row house on or just behind the beach, and 8+’ storm surge is predicted, you should go. If your house is 300 yards from the river:go. But if you look at zone “B” in Georgetown county, heavily stressed to be a “ get out, or play with your life” zone, pretty much nothing happened. Again.
The notion that a government evacuation order should override individuals’ own assessments of the situation is wrong to me. Some people will make dumb choices, sure. But that is a part of life. And we don’t fill in all back yard swimming pools, or take away all car keys either, even though both would mean minimizing avoidable injury and death.
If you stay, you risk emergency services not bring available to you, and that should be part of your decision matrix. You may be without power for days or longer. You may even be an idiot in a van by the river. But deciding to stay should not be criminalized, or even derided.
What do the local governments provide for those without the means to evacuate? In the cities one doesn’t need a car because of available public transit & high density of services (you can walk to the store). Were any of the towns providing any busing to shelters?
I heard one of the colleges (UNC-Wilmington?) shut down the dorms for the weekend; many/most students don’t have a car. What about those that don’t live locally? Assuming I had a child there, I’m 8-10 hours away…& that’s with interstates that are going both ways, they made some roads exit only & I couldn’t drive south on those interstates. What about gas; could I fill up my tank or were the stations empty/closed? Could I afford a last-minute plane ticket of probably > $1000 for my hypothetical child?
Exactly. And for some colossal percentage of the 4 million plus people living in the Houston area, things were just fine- wet, but fine.
The thing with hurricanes is that for an effective evacuation order, they have to give the order with enough advance warning that people can actually prepare and clear out. But our predictions are such that if they issue them at that time, they’re going to catch a pretty good number of people who really don’t need to evacuate because the hurricane makes landfall nowhere near them, or decreased in intensity (Florence), etc… Or just because the authorities have no experience with them and have an overabundance of caution; had Florence made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast as a Cat 1 hurricane, I’d be surprised if there would be ANY evacuation orders whatsoever.
So people tend to be kind of skeptical unless they are thinking that the hurricane is going to hit them dead center, and it’s a serious storm.
Hurricanes in the Southeastern US get regarded much the same way as earthquakes (really, tremors) do in California.
To me, if I go to California, every tremor is a “We’re gonna DIE!” moment. Every tremble is 1906 San Francisco or 1994 Northridge. I’m not used to tremors. I don’t “know” them. I haven’t been through hundreds of them. To me, my instinct is that if the ground shakes even a little, buildings are coming down. Meanwhile, native Californians get a chuckle over my skittishness.
Hurricanes and tropical storms (especially the latter) are sort of like that. People not from down here often think first, second, and third of Andrew- and Katrina-level storms when they think of “hurricanes”. That widespread devastation, buildings flattened, 100,000s without homes, etc. is the typical default hurricane. In fact, people who are raised down here have memories of going outside and playing in the winds (sheets of cardboard and roller skates!) during hurricanes and tropical storms. Of days off of school with no light but candles and flashlights. Spending a week eating non-perishable food. Things like that. More inconvenience and discomfort than “imminent threat of death”.
True. My family (Houston area and La Marque/Texas City) pretty much didn’t bat an eye at anything under Category 3. Category 3 storms got the windows boarded (the people closer to the coast had steel storm shutters already) and all the emergency supplies got checked and topped off. Cat 4 storm would make the coastal people probably clear out to our house in Houston, with Cat 5 storms making us all think of bailing if it was expected to hit the area dead-center.
Having been through this several times, it is actually a serious question.
First, it is an very personal question. Each person’s situation is different. I know one family that was trapped on the MS coast by Katrina because she had to stay at work and help the disabled people in the shelter remain safe until it was too late for she and her family to evacuate. The shelter was secure-their apartment by the beach not nearly so much… If she had left there would have been repercussions, not the least of which is that she would have lost her job and never gotten another in that field. Thems are the rules. Other people stay because they know their personal situation means that they will be safe. Almost always they are right. Then there are the people who won’t or (more often) can’t think ahead. They are the ones that need rescuing after the storm. It is a small percentage of the stay behinds, but they are the ones we need to be concerned about.
Hurricanes rarely cause significant wind damage beyond the photogenic stuff you see on TV. Flooding causes 90% of the damage. And most deaths are due to the reduced services after the storm and flooding has gone. So staying during the storm isn’t that risky and there is a pretty much iron rule-emergency services don’t go out during high winds. Flooding is different. Even down on the gulf coast we have swift water rescues after the storms. Usually rescue consists of a big army truck and a couple of flat boats, but someone always gets into that one spot where it is really dangerous.
We owe the people who stay behind the same as anyone else. No more, no less. If they get in trouble they deserve help just like anyone else. And just like anyone else, it the risk to the emergency services is too high, then no rescue can be attempted at that time.
The goal of all evacuations is to reduce the local population enough that the emergency repair services can move freely in a congested area and open things back up. Oh and to save a few lives. But that really isn’t the point. When the roads are clogged with trees, it is a lot easier to clear them without traffic jams as well.
Give the warning. Those who can leave but don’t get no assistance until everyone else is safe.
Those who don’t want to go to a shelter because they feel security and resources will be inadequate–same deal. Stay and maybe die, or go and maybe get mugged and live to cry about it.
The time for ensuring the adequacy of shelters is NOT during the problem, but before. Vote, activate, grow the hell up and anticipate disasters and plan accordingly. Be willing to pay the taxes if that what it takes. Stop buying the bullshit that every tax-funded venture has to show black numbers in the ledger–sometimes we should spend money on quality of life, even when there is no payoff–and start showing suspicion toward those who insist “safe and adequate evacuation shelters” are a luxury we can’t afford.