This evening, Rob was reading something online and said, “Hey, there’re going to be as many as 25 hurricane this season. How do we evacuate during COVID?”
Me: You don’t.
Rob: You’d want to stay here?
Me: Huh?
This is like asking what you would do if everything went off the grid tomorrow and never came back. You don’t know what you would do until it happens. You can speculate all you want, but the bottom line is that you don’t know.
We considered evacuating before Irma in September 2017. But just getting out of the state with millions of other people, on I-95, I-75 and the Florida turnpike, felt like insanity, and in the end, we stayed behind. Our friends Arlene and Neal evacuated, 18 hours to get to some small town in southern Georgia, a trip that usually takes about eight to nine hours on a good day.
That was the largest evacuation in Florida history.
Whether you evacuate or not depends on the strength of the storm, where and when it’s forecast to make landfall, what category the hurricane is, how long it will take you to get to somewhere that’s safe, all the minutia. It also depends on what your personal situation is.
If you have young or sick children, elderly parents, pets that can or can’t make the trip, or if you live to the beach… all the personal minutia, too, that sculpts your decision.
So if we have some cat 5 hurricane aimed at South Florida this season, have some sort of plan. Pay attention to the synchronicities, those early warning signs. And whether your plan is to you stay or leave, understand this is all part of what our futures with climate change may look like.
so true- the climate change issue
so much for mother earth to endure these days – and for her people-
y’all stay safe!
You stay safe too!