On evacuations and hurricanes

It’s so easy, watching on the news, to scream at people who don’t evacuate ahead of oncoming storms. I get it. I scream at them, too. It’s often a fitting reaction.

And yet.

Evacuation is a process. It’s not “throw a handful of things in an overnight bag and floor it.” You still need to put in the time, money, and effort of preparing your house (or condo, or apartment) for the storm, to maximize the chance of having anything to come back to. You need to have somewhere to go: if you don’t have a friend somewhere out of harm’s way you can stay with, the farther you’re going to have to drive to find a hotel room or an open shelter, and the worse the traffic jam will be getting there. You can solve those problems if you evacuate earlier—before the mandatory orders come down—but only if you have the resources to do so.

As I’m typing this, on a beautiful-looking Tuesday morning with a partly cloudy blue sky outside my office window, I’m more or less in the path of Hurricane Milton. If it sticks with projections, it’ll pass within 60 miles of here. Over the past day or so, I’ve watched many people who need to panic do so—and many people who maybe don’t need to panic do so, too, often because people are shouting at them on social media to panic. I don’t doubt this is well-intentioned, but I doubt it’s helpful.

There’s a straightforward metric to use to decide if you should evacuate:

• If you are in an evacuation zone that’s been told to evacuate, evacuate.
• If you aren’t, don’t.

Sure, there are exceptions—for instance, if you need power for medical devices, get to a special needs shelter. But evacuating when you don’t need to is at best unnecessary and at worst makes things fractionally worse for people who do have to evacuate by putting one more vehicle on the road and occupying one more hotel room.

I’ll be surprised if we don’t lose power and wired internet by Thursday morning, but despite being in the “Greater Tampa Bay Area,” I’m over 30 miles inland on relatively high ground. (“High” is always relative in Florida, of course, but we’re 70 feet over sea level.) There are flooding concerns if the conditions are right, because they’re inescapable here—the state is full of lakes and rivers—but for now they’re not likely.

See you on the other side.

Footnote: wildfire threat in California vs. hurricane threat in Florida

I feel—tentatively—like it’s easier to provision a home (or subdivision) with fire breaks than it is to protect against storm surges, hurricane force winds, and floods. Beyond that, this makes three out of three years I’ve been back in Florida with the area I lived in under the threat of a major hurricane, while there were zero out of twenty years in California with the area I lived in under the threat of burning down.

Also, the last two years have taught me to stop treating “it’s okay, it’s a dry heat” as a joke. I’d take a Sacramento August over a Florida one in a heartbeat.