73 advance notice rates as ample time on my scale, and it was pretty clear that it would be a category 4 when it arrived on the coast.
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Frankly, my impulse would be to drive about two hundred miles and get out of the way of the coming storm.
Hikermor, I think Dagney's point is that they really didn't have 73 hours notice. When the storm was 73 hours from landfall, it was only a tropical storm. Not trivial, to be sure, but certainly not rising to anywhere the same level of concern as the Cat 4 (almost Cat 5) storm it was at landfall. The intensification happened very fast, and even the meteorologists were very surprised:
Hurricane Michael Intensified Quickly, Taking Many by Surprise What began as a blip of news this past weekend — a tropical storm lurking in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles south of Florida — escalated on Wednesday into the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental United States in decades.
Hurricane Michael took millions of residents by surprise, intensifying from a tropical storm to a major hurricane in just two days and leaving little time for preparations.
“This storm is very special,” said Haiyan Jiang, an associate professor in the department of earth and environment at Florida International University. “It has gone through three rapid intensifications” in its brief lifetime, she added.
Here in Anchorage, winds of 40 knots (Tropical Storm level), are fairly common, especially in neighborhoods on the upper hillside. These are downslope Chinook Winds, and happen multiple times a year. No one would even consider "driving 200 miles" to get out of the way if 40 knot Chinooks were in the forecast. I suspect the same is true with tropical storms for folks on the Gulf Coast.
My impression is that people down there had at most perhaps 36 hours of warning that it was going to be a hurricane. More than for an earthquake, to be sure, but not nearly as much as is typical for hurricanes.
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