Mandatory evacuations are not.

And again, fairness has nothing to do with it.

Thank you for that.

No one answers. It really is pathetic how a nation can't plan for something like a hurricane given our sophisticated tracking models.

Lots of people do have difficulty in traveling. My mom rode out the last two because of her health (fortunately the second one on the higher level of a condo of a friend, the first was in a shelter with very disagreeable fellow residents).

If everyone gets on the roads, there are many places where you stand no chance to evacuate and run the risk of being caught on the road without a place to stay.

My mom has a house that is almost equidistant between the Atlantic and the intracoastal waterway (.22 miles in each direction) in Ormond Beach, FL.

And people think that if they are there they can save their property. If it were me though in a mandatory evacuation area I would be gone asap.

I remember before Hurricane Rita in Houston my grandparents stubbornly tried to leave and spent hours on the highway and only went a few miles when they didn't even need to evacuate based on where they were living. We had to have multiple family members calling them to go to my Uncle's house on the outside of town so they didn't die in the heat on the highway. All while my aunt kept insisting they needed to go to Austin. That was a very scary situation and feeling so helpless that they wouldn't listen.

Point guns at them?

Tie up police with arresting them? And put them where?

Don't expect help from any official services (ambulance, fire, police, etc) if you decide to stay, perhaps for a few days, maybe more.

And yes, I pulled that number out of my ass.

they drive through the residential areas where locals live and vacationers rent beach houses. They have loud speakers warning the people to leave. They are warned repeatedly of what is coming. They are emphatic but no one is forced to leave. There is a bridge that connects Santa Rosa Island to Gulf Breeze and another 3 mile bridge connecting Gulf Breeze with Pensacola. Once the wind gets to 40 mph, crossing the bridges is not safe and law enforcement and first responders do not go across it. So .... if you stay on the island once the storm starts to move in, that is where you will ride out the storm.

There is one house out there built to withstand a hurricane. It is a round house that looks a bit like a space ship. It has been through storms and did okay (even the people inside survived.) Other structures on the island? Not so much. After Hurricane Ivan in 2004, houses that held together had sand up to the ceiling that was forced in when the storm surge came crashing through the house. The Gulf side walls were often blown out so you see straight into the interior. Sand covered everything nearly 8 or 9 feet deep, right up to the tops of the kitchen cabinets. Tell me you’d want to be there when THAT happened.

People who have never been thru a hurricane cannot imagine how uncomfortable it can be after the storm until essential services are restored. It can be a dangerous time for medically frail folks.
Even tho our house is in a very safe place, and brick solid, I will evacuate just to avoid the post-storm problems.

post-storm conditions can be deadly. For healthy people, it's not a hardship really (if you prepared well), but it is uncomfortable to be sure.

Once the mandatory evacuation period has begun, you are on your own. If someone shows up to rob you, rape you or kill you then you better hope you can win the battle with them alone, because nobody is coming to help. If your home catches fire you better hope you can get outside and watch it burn to the ground without you in it, because nobody is coming. If the flood waters rise, you better be able to swim. If your home collapses nobody is coming to pull you from the rubble.

As has been said before, if you are staying please take a sharpie and write your name and SSN on your stomach or chest and save people a lot of trouble in trying to identify your body.

Has a corpse ever been identified by information written on the skin with a Sharpie?

From https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/verify/verify-can-you-be-penalized-for-ignoring-a-mandatory-evacuation/65-593509898

More at link.

there was a story going around that people were arrested for not evacuating the most dangerous areas and were taken to the jail, where they spent the night. Supposedly they were then turned loose in the morning after the storm went by. No idea if that really happened, but it's a fact that Frederic had very few fatalities for such a powerful storm.