Evacuation: Stop Sitting in Armchair Judgment of Those Who Stay

I’ve been staring at a blank screen for half an hour hours, trying to figure out where to go with this blog post. What do you even say as you watch your hometown become the center of national news?

I live in Durham, which will be spared most of this storm, but I am originally from New Bern, North Carolina. If you live in NC you learned about it in the 4th and 8th grades, at the very least. The colonial capital of North Carolina. The town where Caleb Bradham invented a drink for his soda fountain that would eventually become Pepsi Cola.

While I have no interest in ever living there again, I can’t deny the charm and beauty of downtown. Situated at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers, it is steeped in history. It’s frequently included in “best places to retire” lists.

Yesterday started fairly normal for a hurricane in eastern NC. My aunt posted a video of the flooding early on, we told my uncle to get them the hell back to their house. Turn around and don’t drown. All of that. But it was semi tongue in cheek.

As the night went on, more and more people messaged me to let me know they had seen New Bern on the news. National. News.

The local tv station had to evacuate for the first time in history.

I watched in horror as people used social media to beg for help from their attics. A childhood friend of mine in New York City took it upon herself to be her own mobile command unit, organizing rescues from afar. In the days prior she had poked and prodded city council and others to come up with a plan for vulnerable populations. She likely saved lives.

It’s no coincidence that outside of the immediate waterfront, New Bern’s most flood-prone areas are also the poorest. Evacuation is a privilege that many do not have. To evacuate in comfort costs up-front money: gas, hotel, food, and time. The later you wait to leave, the farther you have to go to find affordable shelter and the harder it is to find gas. The less money you have, the more likely you are to need to work until the last possible minute.

If you have pets it gets doubly hard. The memes going around that hotels are required to accept pets during a disaster is false. And while Katrina ensured that communities have a pet-friendly shelter, that’s no guarantee. In New Bern, that shelter filled up quickly, and you had to have proof of rabies vaccination. If someone evacuates without their pets, the tables are turned right back around to shame them for that.

But what about the busses to inland shelters?

New Bern is likely to be cut off from all major access points for days, at a minimum. Weeks is not uncommon. Floyd, Matthew, and many other storms have flooded highways 43,17, and 70 leaving New Bern an island between Greenville, Jacksonville, Kinston, and Morehead City.

You have two choices. You can leave, using whatever meager savings you have. You’re at the mercy of the government to get you back where you belong. The government, who has never appeared to have your best interest in mind. You spend a week on a cot with hundreds of your closest strangers. You lose pay, while those who stayed fill in for you, making your money. Now you have no savings to tide you over (if you had any to begin with) and you’re lucky to have a job. And when you ask for help later, you’ll be accused to mooching off the government.

Or, you can stay, which historically speaking is a pretty safe bet. The important thing is that New Bern is usually an island in these events, meaning generally not submerged.

Which do you choose?

They were warned. Nevertheless, they persisted.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who didn’t evacuate because they have the resources to ride out the storm. Houses built in the last few decades with storms in mind. Aware of their relative safety, many chose to stay put rather than be stranded hundreds of miles from home.

People with generators and elderly relatives for whom evacuation would be more difficult than staying.

My mom lives on a lake, but up a hill and 17 feet above sea level. The water has never gotten much past the bottom of her fence. Here’s what it looks like normally:

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This morning the water had completely submerged the fence. It’s hard to see depth in this early-morning light, but the water was at the top of the berm. Luckily, it’s still uphill a ways to her house.

And in between, there are a million different reasons people may choose to stay. The vast majority aren’t hanging around because they’re thrill-seeking risk takers. Sometimes inaction is our answer to fear. Hurricanes are scary. Leaving is scary.

I even heard Jim Cantore chide those who stayed. That broke my heart, as he’s a personal hero of mine and has seen enough to know better.

With the comfort and safety of hindsight, it’s easy to deride those who did not heed the mandatory evacuations. There is a sense of control in the belief that we would have made different choices. Victim blaming as a security blanket.

If people knew the alternative was drowning or swift water rescue, sure, maybe they would have given up everything to leave. But it is a logical assessment of the risk of staying vs risk of going.

We all take calculated risks every damn day

Life is nothing but a series of risk assessments. Why do you decide to drive to the store each week, rather than have your groceries delivered? It’s only $10-$20 extra dollars. Isn’t your life worth that? Motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of death. And why did the delivery driver take a job like that, knowing how dangerous driving can be?

Yes, the officials warned of the danger of Florence. They were clear that this was an extreme situation. But we dismiss the roles of meteorologists and city officials every time a forecast doesn’t pan out. You make jokes. I make jokes. We all do it. We devalue their input, expecting precision out of what is basically magic to most of us. Locations get emergency fatigue from inaccurate predictions. The fact is, the National Hurricane Center has gotten better at predicting storms with each passing year, but hurricanes are prone to erratic behavior. Much like humans.

The uncertainty renders us feeling helpless, so we freeze. We could flee west to the triangle, but they’re all talking about Hurricane Fran from 1996. We could keep going to the foothills, but they’re telling horror stories of Hugo from 1989. The mountains are talking about the mudslides and raging rivers of Frances and Ivan in 2004. We all remember the days’ long evacuation gridlock of recent gulf coast hurricanes. The people in New Bern could have evacuated only to end up somewhere worse, and then what would you have to say?

How many people died in motor vehicle accidents over the past week while trying to evacuate?

“Our houses have never flooded before. It couldn’t get much worse than Floyd, right?”

I know I have spent much of the week playing devil’s advocate to both extremes. I’ve warned against the “it never” or “it won’t” of hurricane risk assessment. The time for that is before the storm. To help sway those who are able and willing to make a decision. To give them power behind their decision to leave, if leaving is even possible. To make sure as few people as possible could say, “we weren’t warned.”

I urged people to give this storm an appropriate amount of consideration without the panic of ignorance.

So, some people made the right assessment and some people were wrong. It’s how life works. It is so easy and satisfying to sit in armchair judgment blaming them, or we can accept that they did what felt safest and most rational in their personal situation. They went with the devil they know.

In the meantime, if you need a little levity, there are bears floating down the streets of New Bern.