<p>I saw a report from Galveston that police went door to door in the final hours begging people to leave who had not yet evacuated. There were provisions for evacuating people to shelters who could not afford gas, didn’t have cars, etc. </p>
<p>I would be all for those who stay having to pay for the cost of rescue. Don’t they do that in some parks in the mountains when people get lost or stranded and have to be rescued? They should make them sign a release stating that they understand the dangers of staying and that they realize that they will have to pay for later rescue. I agree that rescue workers should not be endangered by people who don’t take the warnings seriously.</p>
<p>CNN did interview one couple who rode it out and ended up with 4 ft. of water in their house. Had to retreat to their attic. When asked what they would do in the future, they said they had learned their lesson and would evacuate. It’s not just the water, either. Houses are invaded by insects, snakes, and rats trying to find dry ground, too.</p>
<p>My logic is don’t use US taxpayer money (i.e. my money) to rebuild on land that is 13 below sea level. Move parts of New Orleans to where it will have a fighting chance not to get washed away in the next big hurricane. Whether the buildings are tall, short, or somewhere in between does not matter if those buildings are not already 13 feet below sea level and dependent on levees that will surely break again.</p>
<p>It would have been cheaper and smarter to have condemned the high risk land, taken it by imminent domain and give the property owners money to enable them to build elsewhere. Problem solved.</p>
Ditto what other posters have said. In the comments section of the local paper, some are arguing that it is expensive to evacuate and not everyone can afford to do that. But, there were free buses to take people to free shelters where they would be given free food. Fun? No, of course not. But everyone was strongly urged to leave and could have done it at no cost.</p>
<p>Agreed about insurance. Some of those property owners have had previous claims from other tropical storms, and it’s not right for the national flood insurance program to be covering those beach houses. Those are expensive homes!</p>
<p>Life insurance is regulated by States and thus can vary by state. I don’t know about Texas, but most life insurance policies pay benefits even if the death was suicide so long as the policy has been in place for a few years. I think the time requirement is to exclude people who have decided to kill themselves from buying a policy for a quick profit for their families.</p>
<p>Some life insurance policies double the benefits for an accidental death. I suspect a hurricane death after a mandatory evacuation might give an insurance company reason to deny at least the accidental death provisions of its life policies.</p>
<p>There will never be a 100% evacuation.
Did anyone read this AM about the rescuers finding the one person who didn’t leave Surfside TX? He is an old (if 66 is old) alcoholic who met the rescuers waving a towel, drunk as a lord - he spent the entire night drinking. So some people have nothing to lose, and not the best judgment.
Others are just stupid, like the 19 year old washed off the seawall at Corpus Christi. Some had never been through a hurricane, like the couple southwest of P’cola during Ivan. The wife had some physical impairment, although she was young, when the house started to float off its pilings (they were close enough to the water that the house had to be raised per code), the husband swam away to get help. He told his wife to stay in the house, but for some reason she went to the door or porch, and got swept away. The house wasn’t completely demolished, but she was gone.
Some, like a number of those in NOLA, had little to lose and looked on the possiblity of chaos as opportunity for looting. Others seized the opportunity when it came.
Fines don’t work much, because a lot of the people who stay don’t have the wherewithal to pay.
Some stay because they have been through many hurricanes and know exactly how high their property is, mandatory evacs include areas that won’t flood, because it is too hard to exclude everything. This is especially true in our area, because the land slopes up fast, not nearly as flat as further west. My OM has a house that is at 60 ft and 10 miles inland. It won’t flood, unless there is a 60 ft tidal wave, but their road gets cut off. So part of their prep is getting out the little john boat (dinghy) and getting it on the trailer. They are in the mandatory evac, but all they do is haul the boat to the flooded road to get across until the water goes down.</p>
I was wondering because I’ve actually worked in the field of transportation for disabled people, and it’s very time consuming and work intensive to transport people who aren’t physically able to take buses. I know that in the area where I worked, which had some of the best transportation for disabled people in the country, there would be no way to evacuate everyone on semi-short notice. With lots of help from other cities and the use of ambulances, as someone else mentioned, I hope everyone needing/wanting evacuation was able to leave.</p>
<p>I linked the article in post #20. Honestly, I am not in regional planning so I don’t know the pros and cons. Louisiana is not just about oil, but it also has a large shrimp and fishing industry (as has Texas) and people, especially poorer people, prefer to live near their work. The comparison with the PRC is not entirely apt. But there should have been a lot more thinking going into the rebuilding of NOLA. It seems to have been done piecemeal, and pretty much on individual initiative, without much planning.</p>