Joe Vargas tied a beach bag his two small dogs, Peppe and Mama, around his torso before pushing open his front door to meet the wall of water head on. It was late in the evening on September 26, and Hurricane Helene was just beginning to make landfall in St. Petersburg, Florida with a storm surge that has now engulfed it. Vargas, who is 63, will never forget how he felt in that moment, wading through the waist-deep murky stream, debris in the flood hitting his legs.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said on Tuesday. The stream from the adjacent marina was “like someone opening a dam. It was like something biblical.”
Although he lives in Harbor Lights, a manufactured home community overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, Vargas did not comply with the mandatory evacuation order. Not only would leaving have been an added expense and a logistical headache, Vargas didn’t think he needed to—he’d survived major hurricanes. “I didn’t know about this, I’ve never seen a boom like this before,” he said. “I was so scared.”
Those who remain to face a hurricane are often labeled brave or stubborn. Sometimes they feel that the threat is exaggerated, the need to leave overstated. But some have no other choice. Evacuation can be expensive and arduous, often prohibitive. For cash-strapped families, those with limited mobility and the elderly — not to mention those with no choice but to work through the storm — leaving can feel like an unattainable luxury. And yet this decision can mean the difference between life and death.
As he battled the water, Vargas eventually sought shelter in a neighbor’s abandoned house in a high-rise down the block to wait out the storm. The next morning he discovered that many of his appliances had been destroyed, but the damage to his trailer was not too great. Not everyone was so lucky. The disaster left several nearby houses in ruins, gale force winds blew off roofs while the surge overturned vehicles and left scores of homes uninhabitable.
As Helene made its way north, the storm remained unusually large and powerful, bringing heavy rain and high winds as far north as the Carolinas. In Asheville, North Carolina, a city that many considered a “climate haven,” Jamey Gunter faced a different kind of evacuation dilemma. Gunter, a longtime service worker, has been serving fast food at Mars Hill University for the past three months. She was attending a labor union conference in Charlotte when Helene struck, but heard from her oldest son that a tree had landed on her roof and wind had blown off shingles, causing rain to flood her home, causing black mold.
“I have no money,” says Gunter. “We are not paid enough.”
Although her family made it through the storm without injury, she is not sure where they will live once their time in the hotel room FEMA provided walk out in 30 days. The path of destruction Helene left across her community made many roads inaccessible, preventing Gunter from returning home. She did not work for almost a month.
“I’m just afraid another storm is going to hit,” Gunter said. “I don’t have the money to move. You have no choice but to stay.”
Two weeks later, as recovery efforts from Helene continued across five states, more than 5.5 million Florida were told to evacuate again as Hurricane Milton raced across the Gulf of Mexico. A variety of city, county and state officials pleaded with residents in mobile homes and evacuation zones to leave. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor bluntly told residents they would die if they ignored that order. People up and down the coast heeded the call, resulting in one of the largest evacuation efforts the state has ever seen. For more than a week, the mass exodus caused a barrage throughout the regiondeparture thousands of gas stations robbed of fuel.
This time, Vargas joined the fray leaving the Tampa Bay region, heading east to stay with a relative in Lakeland. Two days before Milton made landfall, Kelsey Sanchez also made a hasty retreat.
Sanchez doesn’t own a car, so she and her husband rented one. The only hotel rooms they could find in North Florida outside the storm’s projected path would have cost them nearly $1,000 a night, so they camped in a tent outside Pensacola until the storm passed.
Even so, the two found the ordeal “excessive” at nearly $2,500, Sanchez said. In a twist of bad luck, a stray rock cracked the car’s windshield, something that could end up costing them several thousand dollars more. “It was just this weird financial limbo,” Sanchez said. “It was very stressful and it made it very clear that it’s almost something you can’t even really plan for. Who has five big ones just sitting around?”
The experience convinced Sanchez, a lifelong Floridian, that she and her husband needed to leave Florida’s pesky hurricanes — and the region — behind for good. “It’s not sustainable,” she said. “The anxiety, the financial burden, the last minute problem solving. I am not rich enough to sustain only the risks inherent in life [here] at the moment.”
Helene and Milton highlighted common recurring challenges of disasters, including the questions of equity embedded in the evacuation process, says Will Curran-Groome, who researches disaster resilience and vulnerable communities at the Urban Institute. Transportation has long been considered one of the biggest evacuation barriers facing lower-income households, especially those without cars. This prompted government entities across the country to offer carpooling trips emergency shelters and reuse public transport before storms.
However, those systems differ based on an area’s emergency management plan, and don’t always take into account the location of vulnerable populations or other systemic barriers that can magnify transportation access problems before a disaster. In Florida, a lack of disaster communications in languages other than English has historically prevented such information from reaching those who need it.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP
Low-income households “just face a whole lot of intersecting challenges when it comes to evacuating before a storm,” Curran-Groome said. Common obstacles include having a safe place to evacuate to, which is often easier for wealthier households who tend to favor hotels or other accommodations. Those who cannot afford such expenses must rely on what transportation services and shelter options have been established by local and state authorities. “It creates a huge barrier and stressor,” Curran-Groome said.
Researchers survey of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina found that those who did not evacuate were more often financially insecure than those who did flee. In many parts of low-lying, coastal Florida, “people are under water before it ever starts raining, and there are a lot of people in our community who don’t have the money to take days off work, who don’t. money to evacuate, who don’t have money to stockpile food,” said Andrea Mercado, executive director of the grassroots organization Florida Rising.
Age also tends to determine who chooses to stay. Older adults are more likely to avoid evacuation due to mobility limitations, health concerns and the ability to cope with the stress. Having pets, and not knowing which emergency shelters accept them, are also frequent deterrents.
Longtime nurse Mary Mitchell in Sarasota, not far from where Milton landed, stayed behind out of a sense of duty to her job. Evacuating before a hurricane is something she sees as a “very complex set of decisions to be made, almost like a matrix in your mind about, ‘Okay, what does this storm look like? Am I in that path? What is my zone? What am I doing?’” As a nurse and hospital manager, her “moral or ethical dilemma” is her commitment to caring for her community through the work she does.
“It’s hard because you get bombarded with: ‘Why don’t you get out of there? You have to get out of there,” she said. “Give people some mercy.”
