..... At the top of the list is the governments bend towards over-protecting us and putting their fingers of control into just everything. It makes you distrust them, and that spills over into warnings and evacuation orders.
.... There's a point where government undermines themselves and we tend to laugh at them based on their silly over-reactions to things. Do we still believe them when they say "this one will be a monster"?
I would probably evacuate. But the above thoughts would be going through my mind.
I think it is a bit more complicated than just government-over reaction. Leaving the politics out of the discussion, consider this:
Hurricane forecasts for both track and intensity are in the form of probabilities. So far, Hurricane Matthew seems to have fallen well within the predicted range. If the track had been just slightly west of its actual track (well within the probability distribution), many of those people in Florida who refused to evacuate would be in serious trouble. I suppose part of the problem is the public's general lack understanding of simple probability.
Emergency managers (i.e. "government") have to go with the best available info, which are those probability distributions. If government had not ordered an evacuation, and the track had been even slightly to the west, I suspect there would be many here on ETS and elsewhere bitc..... oops, I mean complaining about the "incompetent government who had the data but didn't warn us". Recall how much criticism there was of the Bush administration for their response, or rather lack thereof to Katrina.
Certainly there are valid reasons why people don't want to evacuate. Any disruption of normal daily life is a pain in the rear. People have concerns about looting, though in most cases the authorities seem to do a pretty good job of keeping that to a minimum. People worry about pets, though nowadays most shelters have provisions for pets. Livestock is a big issue, and I don't know if there is a good solution to that. And, the fact that in some cases the storm isn't as bad as predicted lulls people into a false sense of security ("...we didn't evacuate last time and everything turned out fine..."). But the bottom line is that Matthew was a very dangerous storm which killed more than 800 people in Haiti, and government has a moral obligation to take it seriously. Also note that
it ain't over yet.
In another thread there was a link to a
bio of FEMA head Craig Fugate. I like this quote:
He criticizes the media for “celebrating” people who choose not to evacuate and then have to be rescued on live TV—while ignoring all the people who were prepared. “This is a tragedy, this whole Shakespearean circle we’re in. You never hear the media say, ‘Hey, you’re putting this rescue worker in danger.’”
EDIT: More on the current damage of Matthew:
Hurricane Matthew batters South Carolina coast; storm-surge flooding feared Some of the photos accompanying this article of people playing in the surf, are good demonstrations of what Fugate was talking about. For example see photos #15, 34, and 46.
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