I understand that, but I would still prefer it to drowning, so I wouldn't wait for the government to tell me to go, when the cone and its path have been all over the media for several days already.
I have to disagree. https://www.tallahassee.com/story/w...uthwest-florida-evacuation-orders/8140251001/ https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/...uild-bridge-defends-evacuation-decisions-ian/ These are false and damning statements. The evacuation order came on Tuesday. However, this is the NOAA Hurricane Advisory from Monday at 11am https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2022/al09/al092022.discus.014.shtml? And They were warned Monday morning about a life threatening storm surge with the highest risk in the Ft Myers area. If they issued the evacuation order than, they'd have 48 hours to have everyone out. They waited a day, and that costed many people their lives.
We can close this thread. Now that Ron has given Biden a compliment he has 0 shot at winning the primary.
The evacuation order is absolutely critical - people can't leave their jobs without it - so when it's given late, people are still stuck at work instead of evacuating.
If your criticism is that DeSantis didn't order an evacuation of Fort Meyers sooner that is a fair criticism. That said things can change rapidly with a path of a hurricane, that is why it's literally called "cone of uncertainty". The claim that DeSantis didn't set up shelters or try to get the word out isn't true though he did and as you acknowledge did relatively early for the Tampa Bay area. Given that was looking like it was the largest population center that coudl be hit it makes sense that efforts were focused there. To switch on quickly though to move resources and evacuate isn't easy. There are a logistics involved. So yes he probably could've reacted quicker but that is easier said than done. There are a lot of other things to criticize DeSantis about. His response to Hurricane Ian I wouldn't say it was perfect but he's done what a good administrator should do.
If he did a good job he wouldn't need him and his staff to outright lie about when they ordered the evacuation. As I showed NOAA gave the heads up Monday at 11am. Lee County didn't order the evacuation until Tuesday. A lot of shelters can't exist until you put forward that evacuation order given that many of them are schools. WTF were schools doing open on Monday? To your point, there is a cone of uncertainty. Just as in Louisiana during Katrina they were 8 hours late in ordering an evacuation, here in Florida that clearly was the case in Lee County. You can't use the "well the Hurricane was heading in a different direction excuse). There were models predicting a hit further south than Tampa. There's no excuse. Look I give DeSantis credit for declaring a state of emergency as early as he did. But that doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes here. He did. There's no excuse for this kind of loss of life when you knew all of this was well within the realm of possibility long before you claimed you did.
You must have confused my post for someone or something else. I was responding to a post about the path of this hurricane on 9/27 and so I posted a graph of the projected path of this hurricane as of 9/27. It was exactly on point and not cherry picking. As for the model... 5 days out, it's very difficult to predict. 3 days out, it's much better. If you bet on the exact landfall location, you will be wrong much more often than not. If you bet on a general area, you will be right quite often with today's models. This is again why hurricane forecaster always emphasizes - don't look at the dotted line that shows the projected landfall, but the general areas or the "cone of uncertainty". Quite important this time is the FL geography. The FL west coast is almost vertical and in line with the path of a typical gulf hurricane heading north. Because of that, it takes just a tiny shift to make a big change in where the storm makes landfall. That's why the 9/27 map still showed a huge "cone of uncertainty". Ian's projected path 3 days out wasn't that off.
I haven’t read anything that leads me to believe DeSantis hasn’t handled this hurricane sufficiently or even well. While I don’t agree with him on a number of social issues, he does seem like a strong administrator.
No, I don't think people who evac have regrets even with false alarms. But it does make it harder to get them to evac the next time. It is a freaking huge hassle and can be very expensive to evacuate. Not everyone is able to evacuate even if they wanted to. That's why it's very important to have local shelters and enough warnings to prepare. I haven't followed the evacuation of this storm closely enough to know if that one-day delay was a big mistake. It depends on if there were enough time for folks to get out and whether shelters were in place for people to go to. If you think that's a major mistake, you probably want to find out if there were issues - were there long lines to get out? Were roads closed and they can't get out? Were shelters in place.... etc.
You are correct, we were smart to evacuate. In retrospect, we didn't need to. But, I don't regret the decision to go.
One day is huge. If you are a nurse and the evac order comes on a Tuesday morning by the time you get home from work you don't have time to evac. This actually was what people reported. Had it come one day earlier as it should have, it would have made a big difference for many.
I think that’s a fair criticism but not as damn I as you think it is given the uncertain mature of the hurricane. You’re also acknowledging the difficulties involved with changing the evacuation order and setting up new shelters. So again DeSantis’s response wasn’t perfect. I think everything can agree on that’s was it horrible and deserves an ‘F’ I don’t think so and your admitting that DeSantis did do many things right.
I just read the Orlando Sentinel/NYT piece. Sounds like Lee County didn't follow its own plan to order the evac sooner. Hurricane Ian: Evacuation order delayed in Lee County But while officials along much of that coastline responded with orders to evacuate on Monday, emergency managers in Lee County held off, pondering during the day whether to tell people to flee, but then deciding to see how the forecast evolved overnight. The delay, an apparent violation of the meticulous evacuation strategy the county had crafted for just such an emergency, may have contributed to catastrophic consequences that are still coming into focus as the death toll continues to climb. Lee County, which includes the hard-hit seaside community of Fort Myers Beach, as well as the towns of Fort Myers, Sanibel and Cape Coral, did not issue a mandatory evacuation order for the areas likely to be hardest hit until Tuesday morning, a day after several neighboring counties had ordered their most vulnerable residents to flee. By then, some residents recalled that they had little time to evacuate. Dana Ferguson, 33, a medical assistant in Fort Myers, said she had been at work when the first text message appeared on her phone Tuesday morning. By the time she arrived home, it was too late to find anywhere to go, so she hunkered down with her husband and three children to wait as a wall of water began surging through areas of Fort Myers, including some that were well away from the coastline. “I felt there wasn’t enough time,” she said. Ms. Ferguson said she and her family fled to the second floor, lugging a generator and dry food, as the water rose through their living room. The 6-year-old was in tears. Kevin Ruane, a Lee County commissioner and a former mayor of Sanibel, said the county had postponed ordering an extensive evacuation because the earlier hurricane modeling had shown the storm heading farther north. “I think we responded as quickly as we humanly could have,” he said. Gov. Ron DeSantis and his state emergency management director also said the earlier forecasts had predicted the brunt of the storm’s fury would strike farther north. “There is a difference between a storm that’s going to hit north Florida that will have peripheral effects on your region, versus one that’s making a direct impact,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference on Friday in Lee County. “And so what I saw in southwest Florida is, as the data changed, they sprung into action.” But while the track of Hurricane Ian did shift closer to Lee County in the days before it made landfall, the surge risks the county faced — even with the more northerly track — were becoming apparent as early as Sunday night. At that point, the National Hurricane Center produced modeling showing a chance of a storm surge covering much of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. Parts of Fort Myers Beach, even in that case, had a 40 percent chance of a six-foot-high storm surge, according to the surge forecasts. Lee County’s emergency planning documents had set out a time-is-of-the-essence strategy, noting that the region’s large population and limited road system make it difficult to evacuate the county swiftly. Over years of work, the county has created a phased approach that expands the scope of evacuations in proportion to the certainty of risk. “Severe events may require decisions with little solid information,” the documents say. The county’s plan proposes an initial evacuation if there is even a 10 percent chance that a storm surge will go six feet above ground level; based on a sliding scale, the plan also calls for an evacuation if there is a 60 percent chance of a three-foot storm surge. Along with the forecasts on Sunday night, updated forecasts on Monday warned that many areas of Cape Coral and Fort Myers had between a 10 and a 40 percent chance of a storm surge above six feet, with some areas possibly seeing a surge of more than nine feet. Over those Monday hours, neighboring Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties issued evacuation orders, while Sarasota County announced that it expected evacuation orders to be in effect for the following morning. In Lee County, however, officials said they were waiting to make a more up-to-date assessment the following morning.
It’s sad. It stuff like this happen every disaster. There is always going to be some level of uncertainty and confusion. Officials have to weigh very carefully the difficulties with evacuating with what could happen if they don’t. We saw wirh Rita how a mass evacuation could go wrong.
Honest question - if DeSantis can send illegal immigrants to other cities on a plane, how come he can't figure out how to get the poor of the path of a hurricane?
