General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: TO FLORIDA DU'ERS AND FRIENDS: Friday is too late. TOO LATE. Head by THURSDAY to high ground. [View all]GulfCoast66
(11,949 posts)There is no way in hell to evacuate the 10+ million people in the peninsula of Florida even if you start now.
People in shabby housing, low lying ground or in danger of the surge need to get out. But believe it or not, while Florida is relatively low, we are not Houston.
The best thing we have going are the 100,000+ hotel rooms in the center of the state. In the next few days as tourist begin cancelling their reservations we will have 10s of thousands of hotel rooms opening up in this area and they will be filled with people from South Florida. Disney will even be filled with evacuees. It happens every time we have a big one coming.
And there are millions of people in South Florida who are much safer staying where they are rather than taking to the road into unknown circumstances. Especially if they live in houses built several years after Andrew when our building codes were upgrade. Florida has some of the toughest wind load requirements of any state. I just had a new roof put on this is guaranteed to 140mph. Yeah, yeah, the storm has higher winds now, but it will not by the time it travels overland to my part of the state.
Listen, we have done this before. Will some people refuse to leave and die...undoubtedly. But if we send even 2 million people streaming into south Georgia we will have a man made disaster before the natural disaster even arrives.
I do not mean to understate the danger presented by this storm because it has the potential to be a killer, but this is not our first rodeo.
Have a nice evening.