Joe Vargas wrapped a beach bag around his torso holding his two small dogs, Peppe and their mom, before pushing open his front door and hitting a wall of water head-on. Late at night on September 26th, Hurricane Helen had just begun pounding St. Petersburg, Florida with its storm surge and is now engulfing it. Vargas, 63, will never forget what it felt like to wade through waist-deep, murky water and have debris flying around and slamming into his legs from the deluge.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said Tuesday. The torrent from the adjacent marina “was like someone had opened a dam. It was like something out of the Bible.”
Vargas, who lives in Harbor Lights, a residential community overlooking the coastal waterway, did not comply with mandatory evacuation orders. Mr. Vargas believed that retiring would not only be an expense and a logistical headache, but also unnecessary. Because he has been through big hurricanes before. “I didn’t know about this. I’d never seen a spike like this,” he said. “It was very scary.”
Those who braved hurricanes are often labeled as brave or stubborn. Sometimes they feel the threat is exaggerated and they need to retreat. But some people have no other choice. Evacuation is expensive, laborious, and sometimes cost-prohibitive. For cash-strapped families, people with limited mobility, and the elderly, leaving the house can feel like an unattainable luxury, not to mention those who have no choice but to work during the storm. . However, this decision can mean the difference between life and death.
Vargas struggled with the water and eventually took shelter in an abandoned building in a nearby high-rise to wait out the storm. The next morning, he found that many appliances were broken, but the damage to the trailer was not extensive. Not everyone was so lucky. The disaster reduced several nearby houses to rubble, strong winds flattened their roofs, and the tsunami flooded vehicles, leaving many homes uninhabitable.
As Helen moved north, the storm remained unusually large and powerful, bringing heavy rain and strong winds as far north as the Carolinas. In Asheville, North Carolina, considered a “climate change haven” by many, Jamie Gunter faced a different kind of displacement dilemma. Gunter, who has worked in the service industry for many years, has been serving fast food at Mars Hill University for the past three months. When Helen went on strike, she was attending a union meeting in Charlotte, where her eldest son told her that a tree had fallen on the roof, the wind had blown the shingles off, rain had flooded the house, and there was black mold. I heard it has spread.
“I don’t have any money,” Gunter said. “We don’t get paid enough.”
Her family made it through the storm without injury, but they don’t know where they will live once the storm hits. FEMA will run out of hotel rooms. 30 days. The path of destruction Helen has left in the community has made many roads impassable, preventing Gunter from returning home. She hasn’t worked for almost a month.
“I’m worried that another storm will come,” Gunther said. “I don’t have the money to move. You have no choice but to stay.”
Two weeks later, as Helen recovery efforts continue in five states. Over 5.5 million Floridians They were again ordered to evacuate as Hurricane Milton hurtled across the Gulf of Mexico. Various city, county and state officials implored residents of mobile homes and evacuation zones to leave. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor made it clear to residents: they will die If they ignore that order. People along the coast heeded this call and as a result; Largest evacuation effort in state history. The mass exodus caused traffic jams for more than a week. region,departure Thousands of gas stations ran out of fuel.
This time, Vargas left the Tampa Bay area to join the fight and headed east to stay with family in Lakeland. Two days before Milton landed, Kelsey Sanchez also made a hasty retreat.
Sanchez doesn’t have a car, so she and her husband rented one. The only hotel room they could find in northern Florida, beyond the storm’s predicted path, cost nearly $1,000 a night, so they ended up camping in tents outside Pensacola until the storm passed.
Still, they found the ordeal to be “prohibitively expensive” at nearly $2,500, Sanchez said. Unfortunately, the flying stone caused a crack in the car’s windshield, which could have ended up costing them thousands of dollars or more. “There’s a strange financial impasse that continues,” Sanchez said. “It was really stressful and it became clear to me that it was impossible to even really plan. Who has five grand to just sit around?”
Public health threat grows as Helen’s immediate impact fades
The experience convinced Ms. Sanchez, a lifelong Floridian, that she and her husband needed to leave Florida’s troublesome hurricanes and the region behind for good. “It’s not sustainable,” she said. “Anxiety, financial strain, last-minute troubleshooting. I’m not wealthy enough to take the risks that come with life. [here] Right now. “
Will Curran Groom, who researches disaster resilience and vulnerable communities at the Urban Institute, said Helen and Milton were able to identify the common threads of recurring disasters, such as the equity issues built into the evacuation process. He said he highlighted the issues. Transportation has long been considered one of the biggest evacuation barriers facing low-income households, especially those without cars. Because of this, government agencies across the country have started offering shared travel. emergency shelter and Reuse public transport Before the storm.
However, these systems vary based on local emergency management plans and always take into account the location of vulnerable populations and other system barriers that can exacerbate transportation access issues in advance of a disaster. Not that there are. In Florida, a lack of disaster communication in languages other than English has historically prevented such information from reaching those who need it.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images
Households with limited income “just face a lot of intersecting challenges when it comes to sheltering in advance of a storm,” Karan Groom said. A common hurdle is finding safe shelter, which is often easier for wealthy households who tend to prefer hotels and other accommodations. . Those who cannot afford such costs must rely on transportation services and shelter options established by local and state authorities. “It creates huge barriers and stressors,” Curran-Groom says.
researcher Investigating Hurricane Katrina Survivors found that those who did not evacuate were more likely to be economically unstable than those who did. In many low-lying areas along Florida’s coast, “people are in the water before it starts raining, and there are people in our communities who don’t have money or who can’t afford to take days off from work.” There are a lot of people who don’t have the money to stockpile food and need to evacuate,” said Andrea Mercado, executive director of the grassroots group Florida Rising.
Age also tends to be a factor in who chooses to stay. The elderly are more likely to avoid evacuation Reasons include limited mobility, health concerns, and the ability to cope with stress. Having a pet and not knowing which emergency shelters will accept your pet is another common deterrent.
Mary Mitchell, a longtime nurse in Sarasota, not far from where Milton made landfall, stayed home out of obligation to her job. Evacuation ahead of a hurricane is something she’s thinking about. “You have to make a series of very complex decisions, and it’s like a matrix in your head of, ‘OK, what does this storm look like?'” Am I on that path? What’s My Zone?As a nurse and hospital administrator, her “moral or ethical dilemma” is her determination to care for the community through her work.
“‘Why don’t you just get out of there? You have to get out of there,'” she said. “Please give grace to the people.”
