Residents who will stay put point to safety, affordability
County’s plea to those not in evacuation zones: ‘Please shelter in place.’
No retelling of hurricanes gone by is complete without the tale of someone who did not evacuate and lived to regret it — or didn’t.
Government and public safety officials are urging coastal residents to evacuate as Hurricane Irma approaches.
Absent physical limitations, no sane person who wakes up to the sound of waves, who can see those waves from home or quickly bike to them, would choose to stick around when a major hurricane is on its way.
But for others not in an evacuation zone, there actually is — dare it be said — a case for staying.
First, despite the evacuation exhortations, political and emergency management officials don’t want everyone jumping on the roads.
“If you do not live in an evacuation zone, please shelter in place,” Palm Beach County Administrator Verdenia Baker said during an emergency management briefing Wednesday.
Freeways clogged with impatient, frightened motorists are, in a way, their own sort of disaster.
Think of the jammed roadways in South Carolina in 1999 when residents tried to flee Hurricane Floyd. Then there was what happened in Houston in 2005, when the snarled evacuation from Hur- ricane Rita killed more people than the storm.
Of course, by Thursday afternoon, there were already plenty of local tales of hourslong treks to spots beyond South Florida, where Irma is expected to make its unwelcome appearance on Sunday.
Refusing to join that endless line of vehicles out of town comes with other benefits, too. It means skipping those endless lines of vehicles, their drivers frantically trying to buy gasoline.
For many residents, however, staying is as much necessity as it is choice.
Chase Gregory said she and her cat will not evacuate from her duplex in Palm Beach Gardens.
“I can’t afford to,” Gregory said. “To get a hotel, drive ... I don’t even know where it’s safe. I’d be driving for three days.”
Like many in South Florida, Gregory said she has watched news coverage of Irma with an increasing sense of dread and fear. She wants to stop watching so much of the coverage but hasn’t been able to pull away from it.
Gregory said she is worried the windows of her unit won’t withstand a strong storm.
But the prospect of getting on clogged roadways is too daunting.
“Those traffic jams, I don’t want to be in that,” she said.
Fo r C h e r y l B u r t o n , a teacher who lives in Wellington, there are too many questions associated with leaving.
“If I leave, it might be a problem coming back,” she said. “What if it’s not as bad as they say? What if there is a gas shortage?”
Burton, a single mother of two teens, said she has a pair of backup plans if she feels the storm will pose too big a threat to her and her children.
“Worst-case scenario, I can go to a shelter,” she said.
Her first choice would be to go to her fiance’s home in Palm Beach Gardens — if he gets his storm shutters up.
“If he gets them on, then we’ll go there,” she said. “If he doesn’t, then we’ll go to a shelter.”
Like Gregory, Burton sees leaving as an unpalatable option.
“It’s panicky enough as it is, you know?” she said.
Debra Robert lives much closer to the coast than Burton or Gregory, but she’s not leaving, either.
The Lake Worth home she shares with her husband, a sound systems engineer, is just beyond the evacuation zone. Built in 1929, the house is rock solid and has hurricane windows her husband will nonetheless cover with shutters, Robert said.
Robert and her husband plan to ride out the storm in a central room in their home, away from the shuttered windows.
“That’s where we’ll be if it gets bad,” she said.
Debbie Dalin, of Delray Beach, survived the godfather of Florida hurricanes, Andrew. Now retired, her husband, a hospital pharmacist, has to stay through Irma. So, she’s staying, too.
Would she leave if he were free to do so?
“I might,” she said. “He wouldn’t. It’s a really hard decision. You want to be there to protect your house. You want to put something at the front door if you need to. You want to make sure your stuff is safe.”