My child’s speech therapist lost her mother during the Rita evacuation. People learned from that lesson.
In the end, the death toll from this storm is likely to be less than the death toll from that stupid spectacle.
I live here, and the flooding was completely catastrophic....but was also totally hit or miss with seemingly little rhyme or reason. I was in a square with neighborhoods flooded on all sides. My neighborhood got water up to the curb when we got 9 inches of rain in 3 hours but that was that.
The system of essentially moving people from a danger zone to a non danger zone worked far better than putting 6 million people on I-10 and saying “Good luck.”
The one blessing of Harvey was that it was not a wind storm. I never even lost Wi-Fi let alone power. I think 97 percent of the region had power uninterrupted throughout the storm. So, I had local news on, a laptop open to the county website, and my phone open to social media the entire time - as did most people, it seemed. We knew pretty well at all times where the water was rising and where it was likely to rise. I think that helped tremendously.
Ike was a wind storm. People were without power for weeks following that.
This storm has a chance to be a wind and water storm thanks to the storm surge. I would certainly bug out of South Florida at this point if I thought I could actually get to Orlando or points north.
The message I’m getting from friends and family is that the fear of the road is the fear of running out of gas.
Unless I had a beach front condo, I think I would rather be in my home under any circumstance than be stuck in my car on the side of 95.
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All of the points you mention favor early assessment, recognition, and action.
Keeping one’s tank full is just common sense. So is keeping one’s important records easily transportable, and having window protection pre-cut and ready all the time. This is just another Ant vs Grasshopper pageant.
This nation is becoming a field of Grasshoppers.