There was little left of the vacation house that Nishelle Harris-Miles’s friends and family had booked for her birthday.
The women from Dayton, Ohio, had heard Ian was barreling toward Tampa Bay and figured the airline or rental owner would cancel on them if the storm posed a real threat to Fort Myers Beach.
They had arrived the Tuesday before Ian struck and tried to make the most of it: dancing indoors, snapping silly photos, singing “Happy Birthday.”
“We were smashed against the ceiling,” Maston said of what came next. “We were fighting the ceiling, and there was water everywhere. Next thing you know, the roof went down, and we went with it.”
They were stranded in the debris for 14 hours, she estimated. Eventually, someone heard their cries, built a makeshift plank and pulled them out. A rescuer who descended from a helicopter confirmed what Maston already knew: Nene was dead.
Much like the title of this thread, the spaghetti models at the key evac times whiffed by a hundred miles or so.
But yeah, obviously not great, but not surprising. Hurricanes were one of the original “them egghead science nerds are always wrong”, and the culture of mistrust toward people in positions of authority continues to literally kill dummies.
I think one of the problems with messaging is the disparity between what forecasters say the winds are, and what wind speeds are actually recorded. On the one hand, they’ll say maximum sustained winds are 130 miles an hour, and then they’ll report a gust of 98 somewhere. Makes them sound like they are grossly overestimating the strength of the hurricane. That said, in the last 24 hours, it appeared pretty likely that the storm was going to hit around Fort Myers, and was going to be a monster. Even then, people had enough time to get out. Most didn’t try.
Even in mandatory evacuations (like Sanibel), people still stay. It’s super rare that you get both the freak storm that actually LEVELS everything a la Andrew, and it actually wipes out your neighborhood.
Even this one micro targeted Sanibel, Captiva, Pine Island, and Ft. Myers Beach. People in Ft. Myers proper, Naples, etc. might have gotten some damage, but those that rode it out will remember how it wasn’t really that bad, cat 4 no biggie.
Also the storm changed track relatively late. It was projected to hit Tampa, like 100 miles north up till the night before or so. The problem a little of people didn’t account for was that because of its approach angle, small wobbles in its heading would result in huge leaps in where it would make landfall. So there were probably quite a few people who were long-time Florida residents who even were too cavalier thinking they were fine and that it would strike much farther away.
On some level this comes down to like situational awareness that living on a barrier island or right on the coast is significantly different than living 10-15 miles inland when a hurricane hits. The distance from Ft Myers Beach to Pine Island is similar to the distance from Ft Myers Beach to Fort Myers.One moves along the coast/barrier islands, the other moves inland.
Naples is the coastal city that dodged it by some 25-30 miles. Basically the lesson is if you live right on the ocean/gulf, don’t fuck around if you’re within like 50-100 miles of the track. If you’re 10 miles inland, your risk probably has much more to do with convenience than life/death.
The one thing about hurricanes is that you do have lots of warning. Staying on a barrier island is silly. Some goddamn butterfly in Japan flaps it’s wings and your effing toast.
It’s the rare but catastrophic events problem. The average risk is low, low, low. The problem is even if it all hits is 1/100 times it is literally death and destruction.
These videos have helped me understand what happened in the Philippines in Typhoon Yolanda. 7000 dead from a storm surge and the town completely wiped out.
And people are just stubborn as hell. Part of it is (as earlier mentioned) lack of faith in institutions. Another is the immature belief that they are somehow different from other people and that [insert person died] in a storm because they were stupid. But not me, I’m smart!
My mother lived right at the eye of Superstorm Sandy in New York with two yellow labs and it took myself, my siblings, and her brothers/sisters begging to get her to leave the area. Her neighborhood ended up being completely destroyed by it and ultimately got the worst of Sandy in the city. She and her dogs probably wouldn’t have made if she didn’t eventually agree to leave.
Massive evacuations are difficult for public officials to coordinate. You need time to make it happen, but then, the course of the storm could change within that time and false alarms will work against you in the future. Potential evacuees worry about traffic, the availability of gas and hotel space. Some may not be able to just drop work on a moment’s notice. Some of the older hurricane shutters are not easy to put up, especially for older people, so it can be hard to secure your house. You want to tell yourself that the disaster that appears to be heading your way isn’t going to happen. And then it happens, and claims a lot of victims.
Right. I think though that’s part of the problem. It’s hard enough to evacuate the area that appears to be the target of the storm three days early. Add evacuations of areas that don’t appear to be direct targets and it complicates that traffic/hotel/gas issue even more. And complacency is an issue that can’t be ignored. Though I dread the thought of another hurricane approaching Florida, I think it will be interesting to see how everyone reacts to it. More panic, less complacency seems highly likely.
To top it off, if you live in Florida for a while you will live through a number of storms that threaten the state, many of which will not impact you near as much as the warnings and the drama leading up to the storm hitting, so you can get complacent or lulled into a sense of false security, thinking they never amount to as much as the warnings say. My trainer essentially told me this, she’s like I don’t really pay attention to the warnings anymore, they never seem to amount to much of anything. She has lived in Florida her whole life.
The girl I’m dating had some friends that rode out the storm in a single story house near Ft Myers Beach. They said it was the most terrifying thing they’ve ever been through, said all the exterior walls were shaking and were leaking water. Fcking crazy.
