Yeah people have this idea that the government actually does jack shit except for being like “hey leave the area or you’re gonna die, sucks to be you lol” maybe they think they’re working to set up thousands of people in stadiums or whatever, and sometimes that does happen, but overwhelmingly it’s just telling people to spend over a months’ rent to stay at a hotel with surge pricing.

That’s right.

Always think of this great (rare) FB post back from when Florence hit NC as it sums up exactly this.

Two nights ago I called Alyeesha – a friend of a friend who had stayed at my house a few years ago when she was escaping a bad relationship. She lives Down East, back in her hometown in Carteret County, in a small one-room house that was her grandma’s sharecropping cabin. She rents the cabin from the man who now owns the land; it is not hers. I’ve been there once. She had a mattress on the floor, a sofa from a Rent-a-Center, and a picture of her grandmother on the wall. I wanted to let her know that if she was evacuating from the hurricane, there was a sofa waiting for her here.

“Naw, I’m going to ride it out,” she said.

Everyone I know Down East and on the shore is riding it out. For a few it’s bravado, but for most of them, it’s… it’s just that they can’t go. There aren’t enough seats in the car, or there is no car, or the car is busted. There are too many babies or too many old folks. There are jobs that won’t be held for them if they can’t make it back in a few days; there are paychecks that haven’t yet cleared; there are food stamps that ran out last week. And there isn’t enough money in anyone’s damn bank account.

But you know, we all love a good hurricane. We fetishize storms. We are glued to our televisions and we are refreshing our screens. We talk about the wind speed, we marvel at the tattered piers. It’s almost like we want it. Truth is, I think Alyeesha and all my friends are going to be just fine during this hurricane. After all, as terrifying as it is, we know it’s not Florence that is wreaking havoc on North Carolina. It’s everything that comes later; it’s everything after the storm; it’s everything that was before.

We know that it is the slow seep of the water back down from the mountains, spreading itself out of its riverbed path, breaking itself out the creeks and cricks, rushing itself off the pavement of the cities and going Down East. It’s water swallowing up crops and homes and pigs – we know this slow seep and we know that it is not just water; we know it is poverty.

The hurricane is the drama, the excitement that we need. We gather bottled water, toilet paper, snacks. It’s something we can do, something we can prepare for. We like the idea of bracing ourselves against wind; we feel enraptured, intoxicated, instinctual, alive. Our lives can be so mundane. So we watch, we watch, we watch. We gorge on hurricanes.

But the flood that we know is coming is something to look away from; something we try not to speak of. It is smeared red clay up living room walls. It’s stalled out Buicks getting their last rust. It’s somebody’s work tools sinking into the river. It’s humid air plastering an old Myrtle Beach t-shirt onto a body as it shovels filthy toys into trash bags. It is mud and muck and poverty. And we know it is coming. It is all very predictable. And we will look away.

Poverty has always been a flood and not a hurricane. It’s always been a slow rolling disaster, with muddy gray water under an incongruent bright blue sky. It’s always been a slow build of mold between generations, of people making do with babies in faded red milk crates being floated on mattresses down city streets. Look away.

Poverty is slow. It’s a looming light bill and a long wait on child support. It’s the uncomfortable plastic chairs at DSS and the caseworkers who don’t make eye contact. It’s the ten months of pregnancy with no insurance and lying to the doctor about the cramps because you can’t afford a referral. It’s the long wait in jail because you can’t afford bail and long Christmas days when you can’t afford presents. It’s the long nights with the heat out and the long calls trying to reach the landlord. It’s the hours in detention after your own boss at the meat processing plant calls immigration on you and the long stare you give him while he hires your cousin for less money under the table. Sometimes poverty is even the long last minutes trying to get through the locked door at the Hamlet Chicken Plant. So we look away.

Poverty is predictable. It’s the predictability of underfunded schools and outdated textbooks. It’s the predictability of an entire two generations of fathers and mothers being locked up and their left-behind children staring cold-eyed and speaking tight-lipped during the Pledge at school. It’s the predictability of legislators turning their heads and hog waste and coal ash breaching levees. It’s the predictability that after the storm we will arrest the looters who spent their last dollars on gas when prices surged up 50 cents before the storm. The predictability of all this makes us look like fools, like forty-something men wanting twenty-something wives. And we are embarrassed by it all. We will look away and not say a thing.

We don’t have to look because we know where the flood waters will go. They will follow a slow, predictable path. We know who lives in low lying areas, we know what neighborhoods are south of the tracks. From Appalachia down, every town has Hillers and Creekers and floodplains read like economic and racial maps.

Alyeesha has the grit to make it through the storm, but after the winds pass and the bottled water gets loaded back up, she knows that people’s attention will just move on. Jim Cantore does not come for poverty.

Alyeesha’s little house may be flooded out, she may lose everything. There is no insurance company to call; her landlord may just tell her he can’t do nothing, just move along. Her friend who drives her to work may not be able to come to get her, she may lose her job. She will be left standing in the still waters of America, brown water on her brown legs, on land that was not her grandmothers and is not hers, with no place but my sofa to go.

But that’s the predictable slow drip of poverty. All your life you are just watching the water rise, knowing no one is coming to get you: after all, they told you to get out.

https://www.facebook.com/gwenskeptical/posts/pfbid02p7mPmZqXLVSkt1WN3ZNgsN3W3XhoksT3qtNJ3Xz8FgeS9Dsu56gr14XPZ9XL2NbCl

Yeah. Are you disabled? Do you not have a car? Elderly relatives? Or just fucking poor? America says: fuck you.

Also in Tampa and not leaving. Be safe comrade

I would have to stay no matter what to staff a local hospital, but I’m not in any evacuation zone and my condo is also a bunker. So i know I’ll be ok, at worse uncomfortable. Honestly glad it’s hitting us and not Cuba.

Currently sitting in the Tampa Bay area while a category 5+ hurricane comes barreling at me. I’m in flood zone D next to E so I shouldn’t have any issues there

Stay safe comrade hope you don’t get hit too hard

I admit that where I am living now that if there were a sudden imminent disaster on its way, I really can’t afford to move or even to evacuate, even for a few days.

I think it’s a lowkey libbrain thing to automatically assume anyone that doesn’t evacuate is just voluntarily being stubborn and smug.

Glad you’re preparing. I used to live in the Caribbean, and we never evacuated for hurricanes because there simply wasn’t anywhere to go. Storm surge is the big killer, so I’m glad you’re out of that danger.

One thing to make sure you have some cash on hand (ironic advice given the title of the thread, I know). As stores re-open, they’ll invariably have trouble with their electronic payment systems.

Good luck to ya, I’m on the other side of the state waiting to see if we lose power again.

Even if you have a car and can afford to pack up and fuck off to another state, there’s still the risk of evacuation traffic. The evacuation from Houston for hurricane Rita (which wasn’t as bad as predicted) cost the lives of more than a hundred people due to the insane gridlock: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Hurricane-Rita-anxiety-leads-to-hellish-fatal-6521994.php

While there are free shelters, those tend to fill up pretty quickly. There’s also a guilt associated with calling them for help if you have a secure place to stay, since homeless people and those with vulnerable mobile homes/trailers/RVs are among those that need them the most.

Most people would absolutely need to bust out the credit card and go into debt to evacuate, and go even further into debt if they want a place where their car doesn’t risk getting flooded. While it’s illegal to jack up prices for water and gas during a hurricane, as far as I’ve seen hotels are usually free game, especially as we’re getting closer to the holiday season. If anyone even bothers to report them later, they can just say they were planning on raising prices for Halloween events anyway. Add in the fact that many people don’t get paid time off, so that’s an extra couple of days of lost wages. Yesterday would have been the day to say fuck it and whip out your card, as I imagine today that the cheapest and safest Airbnb/hotels are all booked up. Surely many of them were already half booked with tourists, since many tourism guides say you can avoid hurricanes as long as you visit in the fall. (Hurricane season actually ends Nov 30th, a fact that might become much more relevant in the next few years.) Canceling toll charges is obviously pennies compared to the rest of the cost, anyone that acts like that’s enough is a deeply unserious individual.

The roads will probably be pretty clogged if you travel north today. I do feel a little bad for saying not to travel south yesterday, as some people on here have gone that route. They probably won’t deal with as much traffic as they would have been otherwise. My anxiety insists that you’re cornering yourself traveling south, but honestly as long as you’re mainland and not next door to a swamp, you’re probably safe. Good luck with gas if you’re out on the road today. Being stuck in your car during a hurricane is a nightmare that I hope no one here experiences.

If there’s one silver lining of the storm, it’s that the heat is actually pretty manageable. Heat stroke should be way down compared to a normal Aug/Sept hurricane. It might even cause repairs and the power to come back quicker if workers are just a little less exhausted working 12 hour days outside. Prep extra ice for your fridge and fill your bathtubs with water tomorrow. Good luck out there.

This happened with me when Beryl struck my town. It’s a little easier to relocate here because the government hasn’t quite been able to penetrate the rural areas, which makes it easier to just abandon your home and leave without having to deal with any legal issues. But money will still play a part when you want to find a job in your new town and the nearby areas are pretty poor as well. You would need to spend more money to move up further north where people tend to be more elitist towards those from the more rural areas, especially if they lack money.

Most of us don’t want to deal with that hassle and so we took the hurricane head-on and dealt with the aftermath ourselves. The town still hasn’t fully recovered since then and I fear for the next round of hurricanes we’ll have to weather.

Then you have all these people in places like Missouri or Montana posting this question about why people would not evacuate. We don’t have the goddamn money.

They need to put their money where their mouth is. I don’t see them donating money to Floridan Gofundmes or Paypals.

Money talks. Bullshit walks. Put up or shut up.

I’m on the Texas side of the GoM.

I deal with the same thing, every hurricane season.