Just go to the Plaza
It’s all very well to order people to evacuate, but a lot of people have no way to evacuate. In order to evacuate you need at least two things: a destination, and a way to get there. The Post tells us:
As Hurricane Ian barreled toward the nation’s third-most-populous state, millions were urged to evacuate. Many did, clogging up highways as they fanned out across Florida and beyond. But countless people defied the orders — even in some of the most vulnerable parts of the state, which could get up to 18 feet of storm surge.
…
[Rafael] Baca, who is riding out the storm with his in-laws, wife and her brothers, said they talked about leaving but decided they couldn’t afford it.
“We don’t have the money for it now, to just leave,” he said. Hotel stays, gas and meals can easily top $1,000 and could be much steeper if evacuees can’t return home for several days.
That applies to a lot of people.
Just thinking of the people who were stuck trying to wait out Katrina in the dark in the Superdome, and even when it was over unable to get help in the aftermath for several days. The most depressing part is that even if we stop shoving carbon into the atmosphere, it will take decades to recover from this climate catastrophe and these events will continue to get more and more severe.
Most public policies like that are built around the middle class…and even with that, there are a lot of middle class struggling from month to month just to stay afloat. And…our roads and highways are not enough to handle evacuations of this magnitude. Even where I live, in a city of 25,000, I can’t imagine all of us able to get out of town at the same time. I’ve been in enough traffic clogs here not to be sanguine about evacuations.
When I was living and working in Oklahoma City, I was told in case of an evacuation, we were supposed to all go to Edmond. Seriously? A city of nearly a million people going to crowd into a city of slightly under 100,000? And the roads…if I think these roads are inadequate, well, the roads from Oklahoma City to Edmond are inadequate to handle ordinary daily traffic. And at that time, they were even less able; they’ve built a couple of new highways since then.
It’s time we start to rethink our policies, get input from the working class, and from the countless homeless or barely surviving, and recognize that we have set up an unworkable system. Frankly, I don’t know how you would evacuate that many people from a populous area, even with reworking it. I’m not sure it’s possible. So the solution always seems to be “leave the poor behind”.
Did these planners take “eat the poor” as a how-to statement rather than satire?
Being not dead is expensive in America.
Not everyone has a car/
That’s what I mean by “a lot of people have no way to evacuate.”