Evacuation orders, safety, and Florida’s hurricane culture

Christina Morris is an island person. She’s lived in Florida since 1993, and in a two-story house on the south end of Pine Island – off the coast of Fort Myers – for the past 2 1/2 years.

And island people know their hurricanes, she says. She was on Fort Myers beach during Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 storm 18 years ago, and she saw “Wizard of Oz stuff.” At one point, a manatee washed ashore. People ran to the beach, carried it on a piece of driftwood like a stretcher, and brought it back to the ocean. 

So ahead of Hurricane Ian, with her mother visiting, with her six rescue animals, and with a sturdy two-story house, Ms. Morris decided to stay. Then the storm hit.

Ms. Morris spent hours sheltering in the upstairs bedroom with her mother, two dogs, and four cats. The window burst, and she had to shove her back against the door so it wouldn’t fly open. Charley, she says, was a “cakewalk compared to this.” 

But she doesn’t think this will change how her area approaches its next hurricane, whenever it comes. “People here are just who they are,” says Ms. Morris. “We just survived a Cat 5. Do you think we’re going anywhere?”

Florida is one of the most hurricane-prone areas in the country, and hence has its own hurricane culture. People here stick “Hurricane Life” stickers to their windshields. Many have generators and storm-hardened homes and stores of essentials ahead of hurricane season. When an actual storm comes – even one as dangerous as Ian – some don’t evacuate. 

Or they don’t know to leave in time. Lee County, which contains Pine Island and some of the hardest-hit areas, has already come under scrutiny for mandating evacuations just a day before the storm – after it abruptly shifted southward. But evacuating an area is a shared responsibility. Local government needs to communicate the risks. Only residents, though, can decide to leave. 

Warming oceans and air are predicted to make storms more destructive and less predictable, so each responsibility is becoming more important. Governments can better assess how locals decide to stay or go, says Rebecca Morss, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Meanwhile, locals need to recalculate the danger of hurricanes in a warming world.

“Florida does experience hurricanes a lot of years,” says Dr. Morss, who specializes in weather-related risk communication. “And so the challenge is understanding that every storm can be different.”

A difficult place for evacuations

In the days before landfall, Hurricane Ian initially looked on track to hit the Tampa Bay area, one of the state’s population centers. The National Hurricane Center’s “cone of uncertainty,” a widely misunderstood model of where the center of the storm could arrive, had most of Lee county on the outer edge by even Monday. A day later, after the storm shifted southward, the area issued mandatory evacuation orders for the areas most at risk.

The county’s coast includes a set of highly populated barrier islands, vulnerable to storm surge – the top cause of fatalities during a hurricane. The population and road system also make it “the hardest place in the country to evacuate in a disaster,” according to a 2015 county document on evacuations. 

More than 58 people so far are known to have died in Lee County due to the hurricane, more than half of the total deaths in the state. 

Despite county policies on evacuating earlier when there’s a risk of major storm surge, the order didn’t necessarily arrive too late, says John Renne, director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University. “It seems like the call they made was reasonable,” he says. 

Had Ian continued north toward Tampa, he says, having more cars on the road due to evacuations elsewhere could have clogged the highways. Regardless, local governments can only create evacuation plans, arrange shelters, and communicate risks to the public. They can’t force citizens to leave. That means people are ultimately responsible for their own safety, says Professor Renne, who researched evacuation decisions before Hurricane Katrina while working at the University of New Orleans.

“People need to have a plan,” he says. “They shouldn’t necessarily rely on the government for help.”

But an enormous number of variables affect a decision to stay or go, says Dr. Morss. Often people don’t have a plan equal to a hurricane’s risk. Pets, cars, personality types, homes, hotels, hurricane scale, forecasts, evacuation orders – these can all affect a household’s decision, she says. People’s past hurricane experiences also weigh into the choice, and in an area like Florida almost everyone has past hurricane experience. 

Most people in the area evacuated to somewhere relatively safe during Ian. Still, some like Ms. Morris, standing outside her house with two dogs tying their leashes in knots, say surviving hurricanes is part of the local identity. 

“People here are just who they are,” she says. “They’re old school.”

One couple’s decision to flee

In the past few weeks Fort Myers Beach, about 30 miles away from Pine Island, has come to look like a tourist landfill. Construction vehicles have piled up mounds of debris. The island reeks of seawater.

Michele Bruns and her husband, who have lived there for 10 years, came home for the first time in two weeks, Oct. 10 – and spent the day gutting their beachfront condo, nine floors up, so the upholstery and remaining food didn’t start to mold.

They left the Tuesday before the storm, after following the weather forecasts and deciding their safety was more important than their stuff. “You’ve got to be smart about it,” she says. “Our lives are the most important thing, and everything else can be replaced.” Locals had enough time to evacuate, she says, but her husband understands why some – including a few acquaintances – didn’t. Forecasts of deadly storm surge have been wrong so many times before, he says. Some people just stop listening. 

And evacuating is difficult. Ms. Bruns and her husband couldn’t find a hotel anywhere between Fort Myers and Miami. Eventually they booked a room in Fort Lauderdale, two hours away. The beach didn’t reopen for two weeks. They’re now moving everything into a nearby apartment, which they’ve rented for a year.

“We’re staying here, absolutely,” she says. “We love this place. The hurricane isn’t going to make us move.” 

A quarter mile down a sandy traffic jam on Estero Boulevard, Louis Monaco sits under a tent wearing a Chicago Cubs hat and gym shorts. He’s eating a free meal from the World Central Kitchen truck, which has been there for a number of days. Beside it is the mobile facility where he does his laundry and the trailer where he showers. 

Mr. Monaco has lived in Fort Myers Beach almost since he graduated college 30 years ago. His wife left for their son’s home, a few miles inland, the day before the storm. For most people, be says, the smart thing was to leave. But unless Ian became a Category 5, says Mr. Monaco, he would stay.

“The captain don’t leave his ship,” he says. 

So he sheltered on the second floor of his mid-island home. Again and again, he went downstairs to stack things on top of his truck in order to keep them dry. Eventually, that too was underwater. 

“To actually see structures and houses come floating down the street – it was a little nerve-wracking,” he says. At times, he wondered whether he would make it. Looking back he doesn’t regret his decision. He’s thankful he saved pictures of his sons. 

Mr. Monaco has spent the past few weeks ripping out wallboard on the bottom floor of his house and cleaning his yard – which the sheriff told him was the best looking now on the island. The town will take years to rebuild, and he’s starting now, praying it’s the last time. 

“I think in my lifetime I’m not going to see something like this again – I hope,” says Mr. Monaco.