Evacuations: Who stays, who goes and why
Mandatory orders:
No-show Flo was a tough call for officials — and residents
Hampton Roads unbattened its hatches, awash in mixed emotions.
Relief that Hurricane Florence didn’t hit us.
Heartache for those it did.
And guilt — for harboring a sliver of annoyance about our own tribulations.
With Florence, even the lucky paid a price.
Closed ports, buttoned-up businesses, lost wages, shuttered schools. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on everything from sandbags to shelters to scrambling Navy ships. Nearly 250,000 residents ordered out of their homes in the area’s firstever mandatory evacuation. Countless family arguments. Leave or stay?
Gov. Ralph Northam and emergency officials have said they have no regrets about pulling the trigger on Zone A of the state’s new tiered evacuation plan, two days before the hurricane took an unusual turn to the south.
At the time, said Jeff Stern, director of the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Florence was “a major Category 3 or 4 or 5 storm and we were in the gun-sights.”
Without the zone system, Stern said, more than a million people in the region might have been ordered out all at once, instead of the “measured” evacuation aimed only at the most flood-prone areas.
“The inconvenience of evacuating inland,” Stern said, is far better than taking the chance of “dying from storm surge.”
No doubt. But even so, did we heed the order? And what impact will no-show Flo have on our willingness to flee next time?
On Tuesday, Sept. 11 — the first official evacuation day — the number of vehicles leaving Hampton Roads was estimated at 20 percent above normal.
Everyone agrees that’s not an accurate gauge of cooperation. There’s no way to count the people who simply headed for higher ground in other zones.
And even an out-of-town traffic uptick doesn’t mean what it seems to because families who are truly “getting out of Dodge often take every vehicle they can move,” said researcher Joshua Behr. “Those are important assets and they want to protect them.”
Behr is on a team at Old Dominion University that’s been studying our storm habits for years, looking for insights that might improve hurricane threat response.
In 2011, they knocked on doors, surveying 7,000 residents right after another close call: Hurricane Irene.
“Irene was billed to be the ‘big one’ — just like Florence,” Behr said. “There was no mandatory evacuation, but it was strongly recommended for everyone in coastal areas.”
Judging by the surveys, only about 12 percent of those residents actually left.
Some people, the researchers found, won’t budge no matter what.
There’s a small faction that simply doesn’t don’t trust authorities and doesn’t believe the dire forecast.
“They think the danger is being exaggerated,” Behr said. “Could be out of genuine concern for public safety. Or because the government is in conspiracy with the big box stores to sell hurricane supplies.”
For the vast majority who stay, though, the reasons are more down-to-earth:
Evacuating is more than just an inconvenience. It’s expensive, especially for low- to modest-income families who tend to delay as long as possible so they won’t lose time at work — jobs that don’t pay if they don’t show up.
“Americans have a very independent streak in them... To enforce an evacuation order for a hurricane would be political death.”
Joshua Behr, storm researcher
Folks who hit the road at the11th hour are forced to go farther to find hotel rooms and the cheapest ones are already full. Hightailing it during Irene cost a family of four $1,200 to $2,500 for accommodations, fuel, food and incidentals for a four- to seven-day evacuation, the ODU researchers found.
“That’s huge for people who don’t have much cash or credit on hand,” Behr said. “A lot of them already have trouble making ends meet every month.”
Money comes into play in other ways, too. Behr’s team talked to roofers, construction workers, laborers. For them, evacuating could mean missing a chance to put in extra hours on repair and cleanup jobs.
“If the storm hits, they don’t know when they’ll be allowed back into the area,” Behr said. “Some were even told by their bosses that if they’re not here, they’ll be replaced.”
For others — like health care and public safety personnel — it’s not the paycheck as much as the obligation. But they’re “anchored” just the same. And those anchors have circles of family and friends “tethered” to them.
“People don’t make decisions in isolation,” Behr said. “If my mother can’t or won’t leave, I probably won’t leave. And if I don’t, my wife and children won’t leave. It’s a ripple.”
What seems to matter little: Knowing it’s a misdemeanor to ignore a mandatory evacuation — especially when it’s announced that the law won’t be enforced.
“There’s legal and then there’s cultural,” Behr said. “Americans have a very independent streak in them, for better or worse. To enforce an evacuation order for a hurricane would be political death.”
For hospitals, evacuations mean real death. In New Orleans, 15 percent of critical care patients evacuated during Hurricane Katrina died in transport, Behr said.
“And just think, what if they died and it turned out to be false alarm?” he said. “Talk about a weight on your shoulders. These aren’t easy decisions.”
State leaders say they made theirs based on the best information available at the time and they didn’t make it lightly.
With hurricanes like Florence, there’s a fine line between too much disaster prep and not enough – a line that can shift with every wobble of the storm.
It’s dicey business to begin with, full of unintended consequences and backfires. The more prepared that people feel, the less likely they are to evacuate. The more nearmisses they experience, the less likely they are to comply with future orders.
“Oh yeah,” Behr said, “this one created a whole new group of people who won’t leave. The catch is, if the next one really is the big one … ”
So what can be done?
Disaster planners say they’ll conduct a review to see if they should’ve handled anything differently, and Behr’s team will keep offering advice to help tweak their moves and messages.
“The only way to completely avoid all this is if we all move away from the coastline,” Behr said. “I mean, it’s not like we’re living on the edge of a volcano but we do live in a high-risk area. But it’s pretty nice here, isn’t it? Most of the time.” Kimberlin can be reached by phone at 757-446-2338.