1. Hurricanes are fickle, and prediction models for when and where it will make landfall are historically poor until 24-48 hours ahead.
2. People get tired of evacuating all the time during busy season, watching the hurricane turn 90 degrees off the predicted path 12 hours before landfall to hit an uninhabited stretch, and then quit paying attention.
An evacuation isn't just throwing people and valuables in a car and going. It means boarding up windows, moving everyday valuables to higher places, making lodging arrangements, figuring out pets (either finding a place that welcomes them or abandoning them to almost certain death), keeping kids on track with their studies, keeping track of immediate and extended family members elsewhere in the path, and doing all of it with a decent chance that nothing -- not one thing -- worth evacuating happens.
And that's just if you own a car, or aren't in a nursing home, or aren't the caretaker for someone with special needs, or disabled, or homeless, or don't work a job that expects to you show up until the last minute and come back to work the moment the order is lifted (or better yet, get exempted from post-disaster curfews and require employees to return to powerless and waterless flooded homes so they can go back to work), or are simply too poor to afford the gas and lodging elsewhere.
And that's only if there's one of these in a year. 2005 had two of these in a month (Katrina and Rita). I lived in Lake Charles (near Rita's landfall) and Lafayette (dead center between where Rita made landfall and where Katrina made landfall). I evacuated four times in two years, once for Rita and three times for storms with other names I've long since buried in my memory, and in three of those four evacuations _nothing detrimental happened in my absence_. I lost money from missing work and paying for a hotel, with no means of claiming either from insurance -- insurance that barely covered a quarter of my damages from the one time something bad did happen, when my apartment was looted and vandalized for Rita.
My life is more important than my stuff, that's obvious. A disruption in my life is better than the end of it. But not everyone can afford the disruption. During Rita, I was making $10/hour on $400/month rent and had no more than $1,000 in my bank account, most of which went to paying for lodging for myself or family members. The only reason I could cover that last month of rent in the looted apartment that was uninhabitable for a month afterward was because I worked for a company that had an early return permit.
During the Rita evacuation, my grandmother slipped and fell in an overcrowded nursing home miles from home. She broke her hip and hit her head. She died a couple of years later in a nursing home, having developed rapidly deteriorating dementia from the head injury; she'd been independent prior to the Rita evacuation, and was never independent or coherent again.
If she'd stayed home, nothing would have happened. Her house lost some shingles but was otherwise untouched.
Not coincidentally, my parents never evacuated from another storm again.
I moved to the west coast after I'd had enough from the 2007 storms, but they stayed in south Louisiana. They didn't ever consider leaving for this one, even when the 48-hour projection had them potentially in the worst northeastern quadrant. Right now, they're sitting under a band of heavy rain and getting online every 4 hours or so to check in, and only when they feel comfortable bringing their computer and router down from the attic. The generator they got a decade ago was flooded in the last storm, which put water up to floor level but didn't get into the house. This one's on pace to flood them.
They've watched storm after storm come through with the same hype from forecasters and officials that they've heard for six decades. They just don't care anymore. Leaving is as bad to them as staying. Leaving has killed more of our family than staying.
A five-day evacuation plan would be logistically ideal. A three-day-evac for 1 million plus shelters and support for the rest would be better.
But nobody who lives there for any significant length of time will buy into any of it. The odds of winning the gamble of staying and weathering an underwhelming rainy day or two instead of the hyped-up disaster are too high. The cost of losing that gamble can be practically indistinguishable from the cost of evacuation, and everybody hears about those stories of loss for what winds up being nothing.
Except that some of the roads people spent 24h on are now deep under water. So you can imagine a real disaster as millions of stuck people were overrun.
The National Flood Insurance program is paying the same people 30% of the time to repeatedly rebuild their homes in flood prone areas.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/congres...
But since it's being paid for by insurance, we are going to get houses on raised platforms.
It is happening in areas hit by Sandy. Other flood-resistant features include raising utility equipment (HVAC, water heaters...) off the ground.
https://www.google.com/maps/@28.232837,-82.7539839,3a,75y,27...
Why not flood safe high altitude structures?
They could be used for other things in normal conditions, much like how subway stations are used as bomb shelters.
There's also nothing stopping you from applying the principal in whatever style you prefer.
Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
If the bad half of global warming predictions happen, this sort of thing is going to be common. If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the you leaving, while most of the population stays.
>Or alternatively, legally require flood insurance in at risk areas and let actuaries price the risk, problem solved.
Flood insurance could guard against the financial damage of a storm, but is useless to address the problems that evacuations are meant to address: human life. Unless your plan is for flood insurance to drive down the population in the region; which might work long term, but we still need to figure out how to handle the situation until then.
>If the bad half of global warming predictions happen.
This is the bad half of global warming predictions. The only question left is how bad the even worse half will be.'\
>If people don't have a motivation to mitigate the risk, everyone is going to have to pay for it collectively.
Why wouldn't people have motivation to fix it? Aid is not going to be enough to compensate for all the damages (not event counting indirect economic damage). Everyone, from individuals, to municipalities, to the state, to the federal government, will come out of this in the red.
It does if legally required - the point isn't to finance the evacuation, it's to make living in a flood plain financially unattractive. It's the "let the market decide" approach to disaster planning, by pricing in the cost of disaster instead of externalizing it to FEMA and the Red Cross.
That doesn't establish that it isn't priced in. It establishes that the value people place on their own lives isn't as high as you think it should be.
>This doesn't solve the problems associated with large scale evacuations; unless your plan is based on the you leaving, while most of the population stays.
There's also the issue of having the means to be able to evacuate. Time off work (without pay for a large part of the population), alternative housing, food, travel expenses, for what may or may not end up being a big storm can be out of reach for many people.
You don't see how having millions of people evacuate over a period of 48 hours vs 6 makes the problem less severe?
That's assuming that people can afford to leave. I read a quite interesting comment on reddit this morning:
https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6wcpt0/la_vita_bella_n...
No one will be able to afford it, so it will end up being subsidized by the Govt. Like requiring a 70 year old with cancer to get life insurance after years of treatments.
BUT, that’s not the case. So enacting the requirement now, all at once, is probably not the right thing to do.
Maybe phase it in? All new construction would require it. Existing residents would get it subsidized for a decade, etc?
The expected cost also potentially brings down the price of realestate so people can afford insurance by paying less morgage.
Really it comes down to acceptable societal risk. If floods are a 1 in 100 years black swan, do we bail them out and don’t require insurance? What if it’s every 20 years? Once in 5 years?
At some point we can all agree that maybe it shouldn’t be treated as unexpected and precautions should be required. Just like we require everyone to have car insurance.
I'm fine with that, but it all depends on what you mean by "bail them out," which feels a bit loaded.
We pay for 1 in 100 years. Sure.
What about 1 in 20? Maybe
1 in 10? Uhhh
1 in 5?
Let's look at some stats. The east coast gets devastated by some hurricane or another about every 5 years right? Like absolutely trashed. Other years it gets milder hurricanes.
At what point do we require hurricane insurance of everyone near the Atlantic Ocean? Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax. We KNOW it’s going to hit some part of the coast super hard every small number of years. Why are we so surprised every time?
I mean, look at this wikipedia page on hurricanes in the US[1]. For the past 160 years we've had between 10 and 25 hurricanes hit land every decade. That's an average of 1 to 2.5 hurricanes PER YEAR.
Why are we so surprised every time?
Something that happens every year is not a rare event.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurrican...
Or at least some sort of federal hurricane tax
We already have this. Federal income taxes are what's used to fund FEMA, which admittedly only handles one aspect of a complex disaster, but if I take your point correctly it would provide a narrowing of the issues.
But an event that happens once in 4-5 generations is still rare.
One thing I would prioritize at a policy level is making sure that developers are not able to run in front of flood controls and profit by building in unprotected areas without paying for much of the flood control.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/congres...