[[link removed]]

WHEN HURRICANE EVACUATION ISN’T AN OPTION  
[[link removed]]


 

Ayurella Horn-Muller
October 18, 2024
Grist
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Not everyone rides out storms like Milton or Helene by choice. Some
simply cannot afford to flee. _

Helene’s brutal winds and deadly storm surge left a path of
destruction across several states. The Category 4 storm destroyed
properties like this manufactured home in St. Petersburg, Florida,
(Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist)

 

Joe Vargas strapped a beach bag cradling his two small dogs, Peppe and
Mama, around his torso before pushing his front door open to meet the
wall of water head-on. It was late in the evening on September 26, and
Hurricane Helene was just starting to thrash St. Petersburg, Florida
with a storm surge that now engulfed him. Vargas, who is 63, will
never forget how he felt in that moment, wading through the waist-deep
murky torrent, debris churning in the deluge and slamming against his
legs. 

“I thought I was going to die,” he said on Tuesday. The torrent
from the adjacent marina was “like somebody opened up a dam. It was
like something biblical.” 

Though he lives in Harbor Lights, a manufactured home community
overlooking the intracoastal waterway, Vargas hadn’t heeded the
mandatory evacuation order. Not only would leaving have been an added
expense and a logistical headache, Vargas didn’t think he needed to
— he’s survived major hurricanes before. “I didn’t know about
this, I’d never seen a surge like this,” he said. “I was so
scared.”

[A mangled mobile home with twisted siding] Helene's brutal winds and
deadly storm surge left a path of destruction across several states.
The Category 4 storm destroyed properties like this manufactured home
in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Those who remain to face a hurricane are often labeled brave or
stubborn. Sometimes they feel the threat is overblown, the need to
leave overstated. But some have no other choice. Evacuating can be
costly and laborious, often prohibitively so. For cash-strapped
families, those with limited mobility, and the elderly — not to
mention those who have no choice but to work through the storm —
leaving can feel like an unattainable luxury. And yet this decision
can mean the difference between life and death. 

Fighting against the water, Vargas eventually sought refuge in a
neighbor’s abandoned house in a high-rise down the block to wait out
the storm. The next morning he discovered many of his appliances had
been destroyed, but the damage to his trailer wasn’t too extensive.
Not everyone was so lucky. The calamity had reduced several nearby
homes to rubble, gales of wind flattening roofs while the surge
inundated vehicles and left a throng of homes uninhabitable.

[A man looks at the wreckage of a house near water] A resident of the
Harbor Lights neighborhood, home to Joe Vargas, looks out at the
remnants of a house in their community torn apart by Helene.
As Helene made its way north, the storm remained unusually large and
powerful, bringing heavy rain and high winds as far north as the
Carolinas. In Asheville, North Carolina, a city that many considered a
“climate haven,” Jamey Gunter faced another type of evacuation
dilemma. A longtime service worker, Gunter has been serving fast food
at Mars Hill University for the last three months. She was attending a
workers union conference in Charlotte when Helene struck, but heard
from her eldest son that a tree had landed on her roof and wind had
blown shingles off, allowing rain to inundate her house, triggering
spreading black mold. 

“I’m without money,” said Gunter. “We don’t get paid
enough.” 

Although her family made it through the storm without injury, she’s
not sure where they will live once their time in the hotel room FEMA
provided runs out in
[[link removed]] 30
days. The path of destruction Helene left across her community has
rendered many roads inaccessible, preventing Gunter from returning
home. She hasn’t worked in almost a month. 

“I’m just afraid another storm is going to hit,” said Gunter.
“I don’t have the money to move. You have no choice but to
stay.” 

Two weeks later, as the recovery efforts from Helene continued across
five states, more than 5.5 million Floridians
[[link removed]] were
told to evacuate once again as Hurricane Milton sped across the Gulf
of Mexico. A range of city, county, and state officials pleaded with
residents in mobile homes and evacuation zones to leave. Tampa mayor
Jane Castor unequivocally told residents they would die
[[link removed]] if
they ignored that order. People up and down the coast heeded the call,
resulting in one of the largest evacuation efforts the state has ever
seen
[[link removed]].
For more than a week, the mass exodus triggered gridlock
throughout the region
[[link removed]],
leaving thousands of gas stations bereft of fuel
[[link removed]]. 

This time around, Vargas joined the fray leaving the Tampa Bay region,
heading east to stay with a family member in Lakeland. Two days before
Milton made landfall, Kelsey Sanchez also made a hasty retreat. 

Sanchez doesn’t own a car, so she and her husband rented one. The
only hotel rooms they could find in Northern Florida beyond the
storm’s projected path would have cost them close to $1,000 a night,
so they ended up camping in a tent outside of Pensacola until the
storm passed. 

Even so, the two found the ordeal “cost-exorbitant” at nearly
$2,500, said Sanchez. In a turn of bad luck, a stray rock cracked the
car’s windshield, something that could end up costing them several
thousand dollars more. “It’s just been this weird financial
limbo,” Sanchez said. “It’s been really stressful and it’s
made it really clear that it’s almost something you can’t even
really plan for. Who has five grand just sitting around?”

The experience has convinced Sanchez, a lifelong Floridian, that she
and her husband need to leave Florida’s burdensome hurricanes
— and the region — behind for good. “It’s not
sustainable,” she said. “The anxiety, the financial burden, the
last-minute troubleshooting. I’m not wealthy enough to just sustain
the risks that are inherent to living [here] right now.”

Helene and Milton have highlighted common recurring challenges of
disasters, including the questions of equity embedded in the
evacuation process, said Will Curran-Groome, who researches disaster
resiliency and vulnerable communities at the Urban Institute.
Transportation has long been considered one of the biggest evacuation
barriers facing lower-income households, particularly those without
cars. That has prompted government entities across the country to
offer rideshare trips to emergency shelters
[[link removed]] and repurpose
public transit
[[link removed]] ahead
of storms. 

Those systems, however, vary based on an area’s emergency management
plan, and don’t always consider the locations of vulnerable
populations or other systemic barriers that might magnify problems
with transportation access ahead of a disaster. In Florida, a lack of
disaster communication in languages other than English have
historically kept such information from reaching those who need it
[[link removed]]. 

Households with limited income are “just facing a whole bunch of
intersecting challenges when it comes to evacuating ahead of a
storm,” said Curran-Groome. Common obstacles include having a safe
and secure place to evacuate to, which is often easier for wealthier
households that tend to favor hotels or other accommodations. Those
who cannot afford such expenses must rely on what transportation
services and sheltering options have been established by local and
state authorities. “That creates a huge barrier and stressor,”
said Curran-Groome. 

Researchers surveying the survivors of Hurricane Katrina
[[link removed]] discovered
that more often than not, those who didn’t evacuate were more
financially insecure than those who did flee. In many parts of
low-lying coastal Florida, “people are underwater before it ever
starts to rain, and there’s a lot of people in our community that
don’t have the money to take days off of work, that don’t have
money to evacuate, that don’t have money to stockpile food,” said
Andrea Mercado, executive director of the grassroots organization
Florida Rising.

Age also tends to factor into who chooses to remain. Older adults
are more likely to shun evacuation
[[link removed].] because
of mobility limitations, health concerns, and the ability to cope with
the stress. Having pets, and not knowing which emergency shelters
accept them, also are regular deterrents. 

Longtime nurse Mary Mitchell in Sarasota, not far from where Milton
made landfall, stayed behind out of a sense of duty to her work.
Evacuating ahead of a hurricane is something she considers a “very
complex set of decisions that need to be made, almost like a matrix in
your mind about, ‘OK, what does this storm look like? Am I in that
path? What’s my zone? What do I do?’” As a nurse and hospital
manager, her “moral or ethical dilemma” is her commitment to
caring for her community through the job she does. 

“It’s hard because you get inundated with, ‘Why don’t you get
out of there? You got to get out of there,’” she said. “Give
people some grace.” 

_Ayurella Horn-Muller is a staff writer at Grist.  All the photos in
the above article are by her._

_Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to
highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental
injustices. Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage
the public about the perils of the most existential threat we face.
Now that three-quarters of Americans recognize that climate change is
happening, we’ve shifted our focus to show that a just and
sustainable future is within reach._

* Climate Change
[[link removed]]
* Hurricane Milton
[[link removed]]
* Hurricane Helene
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]