Do Evacuation routes still work

Motivation

Every place you go you hear the word risk, particularly in financials. Risk of this and risk of that, but somehow we ignore the human risk. Here I am going to share an example with you. And it is about Hurricanes and Florida since the season is around the corner(this was written early May 2024)

Every time we a hear Hurricane or a potential Hurricane starts forming, "officials" start issuing warnings to let people know that (1) a Hurricane is coming, (2) where it is going to hit and (3) if they need to take action or not. And that last part, the action is a binary; I really mean it that. It is binary in the sense that you either stay and tough it out, or leave. And if you choose to or you were forced to leave, the question become "when, how and where", and that is what I am going to talk about here.

Sinking Florida

I want to talk about Florida and south Florida to be exact. Let us look at the map and get an idea of the topography of Florida.

courtesy of topocreator

All that dark blue, is below 10-15 feet. So if we have a surge that high or more, you see what is at risk. And mind you that the dark blue is where probably 70% of the population lives. And the next thing I want to look at is the a map of the counties of florida.

courtesy of film in florida

How many?

And now let us assume that a Hurricane is going to get the south east area and we want to evacuate that "small" section of Florida. Well, according to census, we are talking about 6,263,813 people that need to "get moving". And sure, I am all for safety but let us look at this next map.

We have three wasy out of that mess, that is 95, 75 and the Turnpike. These for the most part have 3 lanes each (3 in each directions). So now we ask is it possible to get all these people out? And how long will it take.

Let us make thing simple and easy. We all know about the 3 second rules, that is one must drive no less than 3 seconds behind the car infront. Assume we have one lane empty highway. And we want to start moving on this highway, we can add a new car every 3 second. And in one hour we would have 3600/3 = 1200 cars gone. And if we have 10 lane high, another exaggeration, we would have 12000 cars gone per hour. Let us assume that each car has 4 people in it, that means we would have 48000 people gone in one hour. Now we take 6,263,813 and divide by 48000, we come up with 130.5 (rounded) hours needed to evacuate these poeple. And if we divide by 24, that is 5.5 (also rounded) days to evacuate these 4 counties. That is with 10 lanes, wide open, no accidents or jams. So do you see how dumb this "evacuation idea is! This was an option maybe in the 60s or 70s were the popultion was 10th of what is today. But now it is impossible.

Put it in perspective

Highway 95 is 1923 miles long. For the most part it has 3 lanes. At 65 miles per hour traffic, it takes about 30 hours to drive from one end to another that is one day and 6 hours. Which means if 95 was completely empty, people will be reaching Canada before 3/4 of the rest of the population has gotten on the highway in South Florida.

The moral of the story

The current mechanism is giving people a fake sense of security. If Southeast Florida gets hit with category 4 or 5 Hurricanes, there is going to be some dire consequences on the immediate area and the rest of Florida. That is a risk I do not hear anyone talking about.

courtesy of media defense