Please Stop Telling Poor People to Leave Town
Evacuation isn’t an option for everyone
Hurricane Irma’s winds whipped around my house in Edgewater, Florida. I huddled in my dark walk-in closet, a cramped, hot space I shared with my restless dog and cat. A loud crack overhead made me flinch, and briefly, I wished I had taken my best friend up on her offer to hunker down in someone’s basement across town.
Before deciding to shelter in place, I had toyed with the idea of fleeing to Orlando to stay with a friend — or to the Villages to wait out the storm with my family, my usual evacuation plan. As I considered my options, Irma’s track wobbled to the left, the same direction either idea would take me.
I also had to consider all of the people driving north from mandatory evacuation zones. My friends from Miami and the Keys posted updates on Facebook. They were looking at eight hours on the road, maybe more, to reach Orlando before the storm made landfall. That was double the time it would take under normal circumstances. With so many on the road, traffic was at a standstill. The number of evacuees coming from areas without mandatory evacuation orders, places like where I lived on the east coast of Central Florida, made the congestion even worse.
