dpep4 wrote:Lee County officials blew it. They repeated some of the same mistakes as LA governor Blanco before Katrina. (Though I haven't read yet of the head of NHC and the President having to call Lee County to beg them to start evacuating immediately.) No excuse for not following their own guidelines.
Regardless, the people interviewed saying it was too late to evacuate are also excuse making for their own poor decisions. I checked the roads Tuesday night, both freeways east and north had pretty much cleared out. Designed for evacuation and patrolled until the last minute. It's about a 2 hour drive from Ft. Myers Beach to the Ft. Lauderdale suburbs, even with rain and possible traffic they wouldn't have had to drive all night. Failure to fill up and worried about no gas along the way would be a deterrent, but it was only a few minutes drive to a local shelter.
I could understand apprehension of using the 2-lane cross state routes at night (no way I would have tried US 41 to Miami late that evening) but further north and inland 80, 78, and 70 had improved to just a few slowdowns at local town choke points. I'm sure they were also patrolled as long as possible, probably until near dawn.
Unmentioned by the NY Times (always have to take their "reporting" with a big grain of salt these days) is that Lee County had 10 shelters opened by 9 am Tuesday, and 4 more opened by noon (11 of them schools, so they did at some point cancel school for Tuesday). The shelters accepted pets, so that talking point on twitter is also bull. I recall reports Tuesday night and Wed morning that officials were worried because shelters weren't close to full. I haven't checked, but am sure that people with special needs, mobility issues, and other factors that would hinder their evacuation could call 911 or other resources and get evacuated.
Despite an inexcusable late start in the evacuation call by Lee County, people could have left if they wanted to. They had from Tuesday morning until after midnight. Not a ton of route options but also not a huge population, its spread out for many miles along the coast. This isn't comparable to trying to evacuate 2 million from New Orleans metro.
People are funny,‘aren’t they?
We have a guy who lives near us who just said he would “ride it out at home.”
Now, afterwards, he’s got a genny with NO gas,’and apparently has no food. We see him just sort of meandering around the outside of his house muttering, “This is unbelievable. I can’t believe what is happening..:”
So we listen to him patiently and then feed him!