Originally published at: Florida officials give residents dire warning ahead of Milton: "THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE" - Boing Boing
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I have a friend whose stepmother lives in Ft. Meyers. She decided to stay put. So stupid.
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oh, my! that’s not good.
Milton has taken a small shift south and looks to track between Tampa and Sarasota. bad news for Ft Meyers, they’re gonna get socked.
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I will never understand why people do that. I mean, I understand if you lack the resources or ability to evacuate, but she doesn’t. She has both the money and the ability to evacuate. She just chose not to.
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I was going to say something snarky, but really, I hope that she will be safe.
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Yeah, “GET OUT NOW” feels like general advice for people living in Florida…
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This one-legged boat dweller in Tampa, known locally as “Liutenant Dan,” was planning to ride out this hurricane from his boat, perhaps thinking it would go the same way as it did in Forrest Gump:
https://www.miamiherald.com/miami-com/miami-com-news/article293712234.html
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I try that every time I see my parents, but it hasn’t worked yet. (Thankfully, they are not on the projected path of the hurricane so they should be safe.)
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From an article on zoo recovery from Helene and prep for Milton;
“And at least somebody on Terrell’s rideout team has to know how to make the heart medication milkshake for their geriatric anteater, Cruz.”
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Soaked isn’t the problem. Storm surge is.
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As a life long Florida resident (with time in Philippines, Prague, and other places) I learned to leave when it’s time. For folks in SW Fl. that time is now.
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i meant like socked, like “clobbered”!
we are already soaked and i start to worry that saturated soils + high winds = trees down. this has happend to us during TS Eta back in 2019.
we are also on tornado watch, and i really don’t like that!
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Yeah, that’s the part about hurricanes that makes me nervous. Especially at night.
I remember hearing a couple of em whizzing overhead during Alicia, back in the '80s, at about 3 a.m.
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oh, damn! i remember Alicia. i was working in Corpus Christi and high-tailed to Austin in the last hours.
Alicia was powerful, but on the small side. still brought lots of flooding way inland and, as you rightly recall, tornadoes!
almost all of florida will be impacted by Milton.
tornadoes freak me the fuck out.
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There was an old local bootlegger who famously refused to evacuate his cabin on Mt. St. Helens in the weeks and months before the volcano blew its top in 1980 when authorities were doing everything they could to clear the area. He said he’d die there if it came to that but confided he didn’t expect that the mountain would really take him out—the peak was a full mile away, there was a lake between it and him, and he thought the surrounding forest would slow the destruction if he had to flee. On that point he was very, very wrong. The place where his cabin once stood is now buried under 150 feet of debris and the forest miles away from the mountain peak looked like this:
Pluck and gumption are all well and good but they aren’t much in the face of major planetary forces. When the experts tell you to flee for your lives then you ought to pay them heed if you have the means to do so.
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Yeah, I remember him. I think he was played by Art Carney in a movie about Mt. St. Helens.
ETA: It was Art Carney. The man’s name was actually Harry Truman.
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That picture is of Spirit Lake.
The eruption turned the lake to an 850 ft high wall of water, and when the water settled back into its basin, the level of the lake was raised by 200 feet. 
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…and it was covered with dead trees, and was, and is, itself also dead. Mt St Helens murdered Spirit Lake.
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