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Kindness, if you are Chicken Little then so am I. When, not if, a storm makes a direct hit on the Bay area it is going to be devastating.
You are soooo right about the evacuation routes. Infrastructure development, especially roadways, has not kept up with population growth. I could do a whole rant on what so called "development" has done to the state, but would be a ranting raving tangent to the topic. The roads in the stat turn into long parking lots when people try to evacuate.
Do you remember the fear when it looked like Charlie was going to make landfall right up the middle of Tampa Bay? If it had I have trouble conceiving the damage that would have taken place. We are 12 years down the road, with 12 years worth of growth in the area. The effects would be catastrophic.
I mentioned before that I live in the area that was in the cross hairs of the 2004 storms. Many of the clients I work with were in the direct path of the storms. Many did not evacuate for Charlie because it was supposed to make landfall north of them. One family I worked with the mother and her four boys huddled under a mattress they carried to the living room as a tree crashed down on top of the house. They lost everything. Thankfully none of them were physically injured.
Remember "Florida blue roofs" from that year? For those who don't live here, people put blue tarps over roof damage until they could get the roof repaired. The area where I live and work is very low income. Some of those houses had "blue roofs" for years because the owners didn't have insurance and could not afford to have the roof fixed.
The power was out in my area for almost two weeks after Charlie. I couldn't get back to my house for almost a week because of local flooding. I'll let you guess what the house smelled like with a fridge and freezer full of rotten food. Once I was able to get home, I'd leave work, drive to my mother's house to fill every bucket and trash can I owned to haul water home to the horses. I'd dump the water, feed the beasts, then drive like a demon to get back to my mother's house because of the curfew.
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