The woman who died from a tree falling on her bed was about 100 miles INLAND where there was no evacuation order, in fact many of the dead were inland.
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The Holdouts
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What kind of person stays?
I heard an interview this morning on NPR with someone who was electing to stay in Galveston. This was a guy, his family and extended family, that were moving into a masonary building to ride it out. They are strong-willed, independent individuals who I think relish the idea of riding out something most of us would consider to be too dangerous to remain. However, this is an evacuation with several days' warning.
We just did a study on evacuations under scenarios of disasters without warnings. We are very concerned about disasters that occur without warning when we have to do evacuations in real-time—in essence, immediate—for example, an earthquake or a terrorist nuclear attack. We found about two thirds of people with children would not comply with official orders to evacuate until and unless they were able to retrieve their children from school or day care. If we have two thirds of the population with children that would not comply, what we would have is evacuation chaos and an absolute breakdown of disaster response in circumstances that provided no warning. Under those circumstances, unless we got much better at having well-developed disaster plans that parents were comfortable with, we can anticipate extreme chaos as public officials would be unable to stop parents determined to get their kids.
Should there be an accompanying scale for coastal surge, like a
Saffir-Simpson
scale for flooding?
There are a number of factors that should be considered: a much more nuanced scale that includes not only force—the category designation of the storms—but degree of risk of coastal flooding, a risk of tidal wave, and you could make a case to include things like stability of levees or other social-risk factors. For instance, if a large part of the population at risk is economically disadvantaged, with little access to private vehicles and borderline access to public transportation, these social factors increase risk and make public officials and citizens behave differently. The storm force is insufficient for someone to make a judgment as to whether to leave or not. Katrina was a Category 4 or 5 in the Gulf and a 2 or 3 when it hit the Gulf Coast. But it covered an enormous area. While the force had diminished in power, it was massively destructive, as we know.
© 2008
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