Reply to Hurricane Ian's effect on Florida voting

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "Hurricane Ian's effect on Florida voting"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DeSantis - and local officials - are starting to get called out in local media for failing to raise the alarm early enough in the parts of Florida that were destroyed by Ian

https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2022/09/30/ian-turned-southwest-florida-scrambled-was-there-enough-time-leave/

People literally drowned in their own houses because these areas weren't evacuated early enough - they didn't give people enough time to prepare and get out.

There is a quote in here from someone who said that listening to the governor and local officials, she'd have stayed home - it took the weather report telling her how serious this was.
[/quote]

Floridian here. While it’s awful what happened, hurricanes are unpredictable. They evacuated St Pete and Clearwater because of anticipated storm surge, but the water ended up being sucked out of Tampa Bay, and canals much further north. It hit when it was a strong category 4. I really feel for limited preparation time those folks in the Ft Myers area had. Central Florida started prepping on Saturday, along with the Tampa area. By Sunday, they said it was likely to hit the panhandle as a weaker storm.

People cannot safely evacuate in the 24 hours before the eye comes ashore. We had orders to stay off the roads about 22 hours before the eye passed us. Hurricanes are huge, and the bands start about 48 hours before the eye passes. Then, the other half of the hurricane continues after the eye passes. [/quote]

You have to require mandatory evacuations of places like Sanibel Island, Captiva, Cape Coral, and Fort Myers Beach because they are death traps if it hits and unreachable if it glances by. Even if you don’t expect the houses to be destroyed, the roads and bridges would have been flooded and damaged and the power, water, and sewer systems disabled even if Ian went to Tampa. People are stupid about risk. They look at the last hurricane and think if Charley didn’t flood them, they aren’t at risk. You have to make them leave for their own good. [/quote]

There is literally no way to evacuate everyone on the coast when a storm is a few days away. It will be like what happened when they tried to evacuate Houston for Rita.

For hard hit areas, an evacuation could mean a month away from home. I don’t think people understand this, either. [/quote]

Not everyone in the county, but everyone on a barrier island or in a beachfront or tidal canal waterfront development that will obviously flood and be cut off from rescues and resources. If the county is going to let developers put that many people at risk, then the county should spend some of those property taxes on inland shelters and resources for evacuation. I’m from a Gulf Coast county other than Florida and worked 5 years on Katrina recovery. It’s idiotic to suggest that people will just have to drown and suffer, there’s nothing we could do. There should be a simple rule. If you are required to buy flood insurance you should be required to evacuate for a major hurricane (CAT 3+), and if you are in a mandatory evacuation zone for a major hurricane, you should be required to buy flood insurance. It is incomprehensible how many people know to evacuate but didn’t know to buy flood insurance and how many other people knew to buy flood insurance but didn’t know to evacuate. [/quote]

I'm also not sure what PP's point is. Yes, evacuation is very difficult - it's traumatic, it's exhausting, it's uncertain. You need to go somewhere, and have a way to get there. You have to bring your pets and leave not knowing what you will come back to. But the government doesn't evacuate people like put them on a bus - people evacuate themselves. There are always hurricane shelters in the general area you can go to. The people who evacuated from these areas in Florida won't be able to come home for a long time - but are you suggestion it would have been better for them to stay?

There are a lot of problems trying to evacuate. You have to have a place to go and a way to get there. You have to find someplace that will take your pets. You don't know if the hurricane is actually going to hit you - we've evacuated then it's turned out that the place we left for got hit harder than where we live. Yes, lots and lots of problems. But PP is right that if you live in a place where you are going to drown in your own house if you don't leave, or if your house could literally be washed away, if the hurricane is as serious as it looks like it *could be* - then there should be an evacuation order. Given with enough time for people to actually comply.

Look what happened when that's not what happened.[/quote]

The problem is you can not evacuate everyone. It is logistically impossible. Take Sanibel island. It is one island with 6700 people in a county of 440k. If you get 90% of the people to leave you still have 670 people. That’s a lot of people to evacuate or ship supplies in for and it’s just one small area.

If you evacuate everyone where are they going to go? There are not enough hotels. Also people from Tampa went south because the storm was forecast to hit Tampa and Lee county was going to be okay. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics