How easy is it to evacuate in the event of an emergency?

Have you ever been on the Long Island Expressway during rush 3hour???? If so you would know the answer, IMPOSSIBLE. So if you are here and an emergency evacuation order is issued, just bend over and kiss your ass good by.

or that you are not one of the many thousands living on a fixed income (elderly) or living paycheck to paycheck and the $ is almost gone just when the storm arrives..

K & R

So many factors go through your mind:

How strong will the storm really be?
What quadrant am I likely to be in?
How far from the eye will I be?
How much storm surge will my section of the bay receive?
Can I be of more use in the house than away from it?
If I evacuate, where to go?
What if the storm changes direction?
How much time do I have?
What's the traffic situation?
What do I need to take with me?
When will I be allowed to return?
Do I send the kids & wife away, yet stay myself?

You are mentally exhausted by the time the storm even gets near landfall.

assuming it hasn't been taken out of your hands by lack of transportation and/or money.

If it's a mandatory evacuation, don't expect help, don't expect power, don't expect food/water/gas for many days afterward.

You need to be prepared and willing to go through it on your own. It's not a decision to be made lightly.

I can't do that. I work in TV. I'm expected to be there during hurricanes. (I slept at work during one hurricane because I lost power and water at home. The station has emergency generators.)

Of course for that, I get to work 12 hour shifts during emergencies and am on call at any time while awake. But I think it's a fair trade-off. And it is the most "public service" one can do in broadcasting these days.

Have you forgotten the famous line? When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout? Now straighten out that circle into one direction and you'll be safe.

It's only the people who bother attending the advanced class who get given hints about what direction to run in. Like in a right angle from the car chasing you down, instead of the same direction the car is running. But seeing that you guys are dumb enough not to realize the wisdom of running in itself, I didn't want to burden your tiny minds.

ON EDIT: God knows what you guys will do when faced with President Palin's shock troops when they come to arrest you for being Arab Terrorists, like the ones in that DVD they stuck in the Sunday paper last week.

School always has light and water!

Tulane 2005?

If people have been in the projected path of a major hurricane for several days and don't evacuate, you really have to question their intelligence or sanity.

hurricanes can do some strange and unpredictable things, especially just before landfall. If it were me though, I wouldn't even chance riding out anything over a category 1.

Just wave the magic wand of armchair quarterbacking and make it so!

:rofl:

Not that we all haven't been guilty of this, at one time or another. The trick is not to make a habit of it...

Two lane road most of the way. Hundreds of two lane bridges. Accidents can (and have) closed this one road for two days. No one can go in or out when this happens.

The ocean is on the right heading north, not five feet from your car. The Gulf of Mexico on the left, same distance.

The road is sea level.

If a hurricane is heading for south Florida, once the Keys residents make it to the mainland (assuming they do) there will be thousands leaving or filling hotels and shelters who live in mainland south Florida and get first priority.

When Wilma threatened, there were NO hotel rooms available from Orlando northwards.

You have to miss work and if the hurricane hits anywhere from your home to anywhere in between, the authorities will not let you return. How long can you afford to pay for a hotel when you are not working? (Question for those four who answered the easy motel choice).

No thanks, I always stay put.

K & R for a good poll.

Edit: typos

Sometimes the cellar or bathtub is your only choice.; That being said, there's no excuse for not leaving if you have the means. I saw tons of interviews with people who were staying because they "spent 12 hours in a traffic jam" during Rita. Some of them are probably swept out to sea forever for their lack of trouble.

Medical personnel, police, firefighters and the like may be required to stay on the job until the last possible moment. Sure, go ahead and evacuate in a timely manner, but you won't have a job to go back to. I've been in that situation - hospitals and health departments go into a lock-down mode in emergencies. I've actually seen the single mother of infant twins (her hubby was stationed in Iraq) ordered to report to work, no excuses accepted. You're expected to have have made arrangements before the emergency strikes.

If you've ever driven out of New Orleans, there are only a few roads and miles of wilderness before you get to a large road network. A lot of other coastal places like the Outer Banks also have very limited exit points.

A city like Washington DC or Philadelphia wouldn't be quite as bad if people used back roads as well as interstates. But those are the exceptions for hurricane evacuation.

So now I have and here is another kick for a good poll.

I am unable to select any of the answers provided.

Everything is easy to the person who doesn't have to do it.

You can have an evacuation plan but people are going to do what they want to do. For this one, we were the bull's eye on Wednesday and then the storm shifted North. It was not an easy storm to track. Some people headed to Houston to be with family only to have to bug out from there. During Rita some people were scheduled on evac routes that became storm paths.

People will bring out their stuff. Passed lots of "family convoys" - a pickup pulling a house trailer followed by a pickup pulling the family boat followed by the kids car. Fueling is a problem.

Unless you evacuate to a shelter, hotels are had to find. I started late, Tuesday morning, looking for a reservation. All the chains showed no availability. Many hotels won't take pets. Rooms are $75 to $100 a night.

Makes me laugh at the idea of evacuating. Before I retired, I was on a "continuity of government" team. We were supposed to relocate in the event of a nuclear attack to provides services. Would never have happened. The roads would be a traffic jam.

pack up, spend a week or more in hotels? Every time a storm threatens?

husband decided that we needed to evacuate just in case it hit us.

Friends offered us a house in SW Florida for the duration of the storm.

We left early in the morning, having pack a camper with necessities for living in case we came back to nothing, packed up the kids, the dog, three cats and hit the road.

I-95 South was really rather empty till we got nearer to I-4.

From there on it was a nightmare. If we were moving at all, we were going five to ten miles per hour, the radio on to keep tabs on where Floyd was.

It took us seven hours to trasverse the 125 miles of I-4 West traveling the last forty miles of I-4 at 65 mph. During the time we were on the road, Floyd passed by. Had it come inland, we and tens of thousands of other evacuees and commuters would have been stranded on the Interstate at the height of the storm with no where to go.

We said then that we wouldn't evacuate again...

But after seeing what happened during and after Katrina and then seeing the few videos of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, I know that if we are threatened by a hurricane catagory 3 or higher, we will grab the kids, the dog, the eight cats and hit the road heading north to the closest family members out of the path (which means South Carolina, Virginia, or Pennsylvania...

Here the real risk is flooding. I'd probably never have to evac my place because I don't live in an especially flood-prone neighborhood. If I had to, it would be fairly easy to pack up the essentials and get out via back roads or the highway, and since I have plenty of relatives in the surrounding area doing so would only cost me time and gas money. I have small pets who would be easy to evacuate. Because I have a second story on my home, it would be easy to move everything of value upstairs, and since I live in a fairly safe neighborhood, there'd be little risk in leaving my things unattended for a week or so. If this circumstance were to arise, I would be able to cope fairly well.

But I realize that other areas might face a different geography that would result in more bottlenecking, that significantly more expense might be involved, and that other disasters are much less certain than the slow inevitability of our winter floods. I have compassion for people who suffer as the result of bad circumstances, even if I myself am unlikely to face them. .

and the evacuation plan for this city is truly laughable.

I remember what happened on 9/11. Long ago I packed myself a bag which would hopefully get me through a couple of days waiting it out or hoofing it many miles if necessary.

Hampton Roads area of Virginia has a population of nearly 2 million people. If a major hurricane made a bee-line for that area, I shudder to think what would happen. There is literally one interstate going there and the plan is to switch it to one direction and shuttle everybody to Richmond VA. Think that'll work? What's the alternative?