I volunteered answering emergency phones for the Red Cross during Katrina, people who were already destitute were now in a huricane. Their mistake wasn’t not evacuating, their mistake was being born poor in America where we see poverty as a moral failing.
Here is an article by a guy who’s staying. He sent the wife and kids to evacuate, but he is hunkering down to be able to patch up his house as quickly as possible afterward (and forestall the possibility of a week of exposure to the elements) and to start helping with the cleanup by moving downed limbs and other debris.
Is it true that you cannot evacuate with pets? That would be a BIG reason for me to stay put.
Nobody will stop you from taking your pets with you when you evacuate, but you might have a hard time finding a place to stay. Evacuations aren’t really centrally planned. You’d go to a hotel or shelter somewhere, and whoever runs that place would have rules.
A lot of people have a hard time traveling. Many people who lived in New Orleans when it was struck didn’t have cars, nor money to rent a hotel room. Furthermore, a hurricane is massive. You have to travel a very long distance to get out of its path. Train tickets and plane tickets are expensive if you’re poor.
Ignoring your political cheap shots, it matters little if they went to the Superdome or went to North Dakota. Going to the Superdome was still leaving your house and essentially guaranteeing that everything you owned would be gone. Even if the hurricane spared you, the looters wouldn’t.
I think that is notable that most posters who have “been there, done that” say to get out. Nothing personal but to say, “I stayed behind and dealt with a clogged gutter” kind of misses the point. We’re not talking about leaves blowing off off trees in a major hurricane with a tidal surge. Hey, stay if you want. Just don’t expect anyone to risk their own life coming to get you when it all goes bad. If you’re cool with that, so I am I.
Slightly off topic - I heard a story where people were complaining about a Home Depot closing so their employees could go home and prepare. A woman was interviewed who said something like, “I know they have families and stuff but I need shit!” Sounded to me like she felt these employees should put their own houses at risk for her. I can understand the frustration but, really?
People often revert to being four-year-olds in a crisis – self-obsessed with a super-short-term focus. In fact, the ability to consider other people’s lives and look beyond the next few hours or days is so rare that people who exhibit that ability during a crisis are the ones we come to label heroes.
My father-in-law lives in Florida, on the Atlantic coast. He’s been been directly affected by three hurricanes that I know of.
With the first one, maybe 15 years ago, he and his wife (who has since passed away) evacuated, heading up to Georgia. The second one was fairly soon after that, and they decided, based on the fact that (a) it wasn’t as strong as the first one, and (b) the house hadn’t suffered major damage the first time, that they would stay and ride it out. He said that it was such a terrifying experience (in the dark, with the wind howling and things crashing against the house), that they vowed to always evacuate in the future.
So, last year, when he was in the path again, he did, indeed, evacuate.
CNN (on air) said this is why you evacuate, ‘in case a tree falls on your house.’
I believe Red Cross shelters won’t take pets. As for what a specific town does in a non-Red Cross shelter, or a private hotel, that’s completed different.
One of the Atlantic City Casinos is housing evacuees, & their pets, free of charge.
Besides the warm & fuzzies they’re getting in the press & by word of mouth, I bet that some of those people are spending some of their free time in the casinos. Why no, I’m not cynical. Why do you ask?
I think it’s a basic problem with human ability to accurately asses competing risks, particularly when one of the risks is very high but also seems less likely. consider the two risks of staying vs leaving. The risk of staying is clearly the much bigger risk as there’s nothing bigger than dying. But the risk of dying is also somewhat abstact. none of us have ever died before, so we don’t know what it’s like and that makes it hard to evaluate. That risk may seem fairly unlikely as well. If you’ve made it through other hurricanes and evacuation warnings are too common, you might be inclined to downplay the actual chances of dying in a hurricane.
On the other side, the risks and costs associated with evacuating are very real and seem more likely. Others in this thread have outlines all of the potential costs and risks to both evacuees and the home they leave behind so I won’t repeat that, but to say the least it would be a huge PITA. All that could distract one from focusing on the less immediate risk to one’s life and making the more logical decision
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to say that people shouldn’t evacuate; if I lived in the path of a hurricane I’m evacuating as soon as the order is given. I’d be tempted to play the hero and defend the ol’ homestead against god’s wrath, but common sense would kick in at some point and I’d have to admit that I’m a bit over-matched. I’m just saying I can understand some of the cognitive distortions that play into the decision
It’s funny (but obviously not funny) - death by falling tree almost seems too cartoonish to worry about, but when you’re dealing with a major hurricane you simply can’t rule anything out. The way the reporter worded that statement is 100% literally true.
We have a lot of cedars up here. One year winds topped at 82 mph at the airport 20 miles away. The tops of a couple of cedars came down next door. Fortunately, there was no damage. A 30-foot limb of a wild cherry tree came down in our back yard. No damage to the house. A few years ago a maple (I think it was – could have been an oak) fell over. The top took out electrical lines, and the roots took out a main water line (fortunately, not to our house). I don’t trust trees in nasty weather.
I have a friend in this area who’s evacuated, but her mother nearby hasn’t. Her mother’s house is built to better withstand storm damage and she’s simply too ill to travel. Death while evacuating, for her, is more likely than death from the storm.
The people living in trailer parks aren’t always taking so much of a calculated risk though. Odds are some of them just can’t afford to travel and some of the others are just not good decision makers in general. That’s of the people who are staying, of course - the others are getting the fuck out of Dodge like everyone else.
If I didn’t have children and knew that I’d have to leave my pets to die then I’d seriously consider staying too. Some horse owners, in particular, would find it hard in both practical and emotional ways to leave their animals.
None of this is new. Pompeii, for example. The people there didn’t know there was going to be a volcano but they did know there was going to be an earthquake - there were tremors before the one that caused the eruption and Pompeii had been rebuilt after an earthquake not long before the 79AD eruption - and many Pompeiians did, in fact, evacuate in time to survive. At least some of the ones who stayed were people who couldn’t travel due to their health (age and pregnancy), and some of the others who stayed in Herculaneum went into earthquake-proof shelters and got buried in ash. People even evacuated to the earthquake shelters there. So they thought they’d done everything right, but the situation was worse than before. We have better information now but we also have a lot of misinformation, too, and at times of emergency travel times out of the affected area probably aren’t much better than they were then.
Would that be a case of driving while wack?
Maybe the decision to stay is an entirely rational risk assessment. So far, 7 people died. Out of over a million who did not evacuate. Say a person doesn’t evacuate for 3 major hurricanes in their lifetime. That would still put their odds of dying from a hurricane they do not evacuate for at lower than their lifetime risk of dying in a car accident (about 1/600 per lifetime). A risk most of us accept as worth accepting all our lives.
I believe the risks are relatively low because those at most risk do in fact evacuate. Just because some who didn’t, should have, doesn’t necessarily mean all who didn’t should have.
How many of those who didn’t evacuate had to be rescued? This creates risk and expense to rescuers, as well as increasing risk to others who could have been rescued if resources weren’t spread as thin.
My suspicion is that the vast majority of people who are faced with an evacuation due to a hurricane aren’t making that level of rational risk assessment (even if a rational review of the odds might support such a decision). They’re going on their gut, as well as other “rational” factors that others have already noted (can’t afford it, not physically capable of evacuating, legitimate fear of one’s property being looted, etc.)
It’s a terrible tragedy that the woman & her baby were killed by the falling tree re: Hurricane Florence. However, note that this type of thing can happen even when there aren’t any type of hurricanes/tornadoes in the area.
I’ve never been through a hurricane/tornado, and there are still severe storms that have made their way through my area that have toppled trees - which have fallen on houses, etc.
When I was growing up, my family made a point of either cutting down and/or trimming all of the trees near our house - we didn’t want them falling on the house and causing damage.
Very true. I know some people have died from heart attacks due to the stress of evacuating.
As far as risk, we all take a risk just leaving our house in the morning. Hell, we take a risk just walking around our house. I’ve heard of cases where people have fallen in their homes & become seriously injured, and even died.
To my fellow “Breaking Bad” fans - a scene from Season 4:
