Hurricane Katrina gutted New Orleans in 2005, and the evacuation became a masterclass in what not to do. Roughly 100,000 people—mostly poor, mostly Black—got left behind when the city’s contraflow plan collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight.
Turns out moving millions of humans out of danger zones isn’t like herding cattle. It’s more like trying to choreograph a flash mob where half the dancers don’t speak the same language, a quarter refuse to believe there’s even a performance happening, and the rest are stuck in wheelchairs with dead phone batteries.
When Cities Become Gridlocked Parking Lots of Desperation
The 2017 Hurricane Irma evacuation from Florida put 6.5 million people on the road simultaneously. Gas stations ran dry within hours. The Florida Turnpike—normally a two-hour cruise—became a 12-hour parking lot where people peed in bottles and ran out of medication. One woman gave birth on Interstate 75 because, well, babies don’t care about your evacuation timeline.
Here’s the thing: our infrastructure was never designed for everyone to leave at once.
Traffic engineers plan roads for daily commutes, not existential exodus. Tokyo, with 37 million people crammed into its metropolitan area, has evacuation plans that read like fever dreams—designated shelters for 11 million people, assuming the other 26 million either leave or, let’s be honest, accept their fate. During the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the evacuation zone kept expanding like a malicious game of hopscotch, and the government basicaly told 150,000 people to just… go somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Wait—maybe the problem isn’t the roads.
The Invisible Populations That Nobody Remembers Until It’s Too Late
Hospitals, prisons, nursing homes—these places house people who can’t exactly hop in a Prius and drive to safety. New York City has roughly 20,000 inmates and 90,000 nursing home residents at any given moment. When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, evacuating just seven hospitals and 30 nursing homes became a logistical nightmare involving ambulances, buses, and a whole lot of prayer. One hospital lost power mid-evacuation, and staff had to manually pump air into patients’ lungs while carrying them down nine flights of stairs.
That’s not an evacuation plan. That’s barely controlled chaos with clipboards.
Then there’s the pet problem. After Katrina, people refused to evacuate because shelters wouldn’t take their dogs. Congress actually passed the PETS Act in 2006 because apparently legislators finally realized that Americans would rather drown with Fluffy than abandon her to rising floodwaters. Reasonable? Debatable. Predictable? Absolutely.
The Economics of Leaving Everything You Own Behind
Evacuations aren’t free. Gas, hotels, food, lost wages—the 2017 Irma evacuation cost Florida residents an estimated $330 per household just in immediate expenses. That’s before you factor in the people who can’t afford to miss work, don’t have credit cards for hotel rooms, or are living paycheck to paycheck.
Turns out poverty is a pre-existing condition that makes you more likely to die in disasters.
The wildfire evacuations in Paradise, California in 2018 killed 85 people, many of them elderly or disabled residents who couldn’t escape fast enough when the fire moved at 80 feet per second. The town had four main escape routes. All four became fire tunnels simultaneously. Some people burned alive in their cars waiting in traffic.
So what’s the solution? Honestly, nobody knows. Cities keep growing, climate disasters keep intensifying, and we keep pretending that somehow, next time, it’ll be different. Maybe we’ll have better warning systems. Maybe people will actually listen. Maybe the highways won’t turn into apocalyptic parking lots.
Maybe.
