Did Florida Botch Hurricane Ian Evacuations, And Did That Result In Unnecessary Deaths?

Extreme storm surge destruction from Hurricane Ian in 
Fort Myers Beach, Florida.  Should evacuation orders 
come sooner before the storm?  That's a hot debate
going on right now. 

Amid the rising death toll in Florida after Hurricane Ian, there's been a lot of chatter over whether evacuations ahead of the storm were botched, leading to additional casualties. 

The focus here is on Lee County, Florida, which contains the hardest hit communities, such as Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Sanibel and Pine Islands. 

As of yesterday, the death toll from Hurricane Ian had climbed to 109 people, including 55 deaths in Lee County. This toll is expected to rise further. 

The quote I keep hearing from people who didn't evacuate because forecasts had the storm going further north, toward Tampa.  I think this highlights how people don't understand the nuances of National Hurricane Center forecasts, despite their efforts to make things clear. 

National Hurricane Center forecasts include a projected path of a hurricane, along with something called the "cone of uncertainty."  Meteorologists draw a line suggesting where they think the eye of the storm will go.  Their maps include a shaded area on either side of this line.  That's the cone of uncertainty.  It indicates forecasters' suspicion that the storm could actually travel to the left or right of the projected path. 

The future paths of hurricanes are notoriously difficult to forecast. Every time the NHC updates their forecast, they update the expected path and also change.

On top of all this, the National Hurricane Center will often note, as they did in their forecasts for Ian, that dangerous conditions could well occur outside the "cone of uncertainty."

The storm hit on Wednesday, September 28, For more than five days before Ian hit, Lee County was within the "cone of uncertainty" or at the very least on the edge of it.  The National Hurricane Center also issued a storm surge watch at 11 p.m. Sunday, which raised the real possibility of that destructive storm surge in Lee County. The storm surge watch was upgraded to a warning at 5 p.m. Monday, September 27, which meant a life threatening storm surge was inevitable. 

However, Lee County officials, apparently clinging to earlier forecasts that Ian would head toward Tampa, did not order evacuations until Tuesday morning, just a day before the storm hit. 

That didn't give much time for people to get their act together, gather their stuff, pack their cars, and crawl through bumper to bumper traffic to get out of Dodge.  Meanwhile, to make things more difficult, tropical storm conditions had already started in the area by Tuesday afternoon.

Also, the National Hurricane Center did not extend hurricane warnings southward to include Lee County until Tuesday morning, the day before it actually hit.   The late breaking hurricane warning might have contributed to complacency in Lee County. 

As the Washington Post reports, both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Biden's FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell defended the delayed evacuation.

"Just 72 hours before landfall, the Fort Myers and Lee County area were not even in the cone of the hurricane,' Criswell said on ABC's This Week.  'And is continued to move south, the local officials immediately - as soon as they knew that they were in that threat zone - made the decisions to evacuate and get people to safety.'"

Again, this appears to me to be people who should have looked at the details and known better. It's true that at one point about 72 hours before landfall, Lee County was on the edge of the cone of uncertainty. 

I'm aware that I'm Monday morning quarterbacking, but honestly, local and federal officials should have recognized that Ian was an unusually large storm, so it would have wider ranging impacts than other storms. 

I think officials were remembering Hurricane Charley, a ferocious Category 4 hurricane that hit the same region back in 2004. However, Charley was much smaller in size than Ian.  Charley was essentially a grotesquely overgrown tornado that carved perhaps a 20 to 30 mile wide path of extreme wind damage. But the storm surge with Charley wasn't all that bad. 

Small-sized storms like Charley can't generate a daunting storm surge like a much bigger storm like Ian can. 

Another thing that should have been considered: Even if Hurricane Ian traveled well north of Lee County, its position would have still placed it in a storm surge danger zone.  On the east side of a northward traveling hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, strong south to southwest winds would push an enormous amount of water toward the Florida Gulf Coast. 

This surge would hit well east or south of the hurricane's eye. For instance, Naples, Florida is a good 43 miles south of Fort Myers. Naples still got nailed with destructive storm surges. 

Here's one thing the Washington Post reported that I was unaware of, and I guess emergency officials in Lee County didn't know:  Generally speaking, there's still a 30 to 40 percent chance that any given hurricane will travel outside the cone of uncertainty. I'm wondering if this fact should have been better known. 

Hurricane Ian was tied for the fifth strongest hurricane on record to strike the United States. Life saving evacuations ahead of such an extreme storm are incredibly complex.  Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center are among the best of the world, but science is not there yet in terms of accurate forecasting the power and path of hurricanes.  

Despite superhuman efforts, forecasts of the strength and track of hurricanes are usually a little off even 24 hours before they hit, never mind three or four days ahead of the strike. This alone makes evacuation decisions hard.

Hurricane Ian hit a low-lying section of Florida whose population is rapidly rising.  This also makes evacuations and planning more difficult. Plus, climate change is making hurricanes even more unpredictable. More of them are rapidly intensifying just before landfall, like Ian did. Climate change is making the hurricanes even wetter, so flooding can be worse with these things. 

We'll continue to see plenty more finger pointing about evacuations ahead of Hurricane Ian.  It's too late to save anyone who died in the hurricane.  It's imperative we learn the lessons of this one. Powerful hurricanes can hit the United States coastline anywhere between Brownsville, Texas and Eastport, Maine, along with our island territories.

We will see plenty more Hurricane Ians in the future.  Lessons learned from Ian may one day save your life.