For one thing, evacuating is expensive.
Factor in the weeks without work. Yes, weeks. Because even if you do manage to make it out of the path of the storm (which isn't a guarantee unless you travel hundreds of miles), there's no promise you'll be able to return home in a timely manner. Roads wash out, gas stations run out of gas and lose power, entire towns shut down.
The actual act of transporting yourself somewhere else is a challenge. Cars sit bumper to bumper, filling every highway and every lane. You've got to leave early enough to actually make progress, or else you'll be caught in the road when the storm hits. I was in Johnson Bayou days before Hurricane Gustav hit. I was driving from an EMT outpost to the corner store, a drive which normally took 20 minutes. It took me 8 hours, all because of evacuee traffic.
If you do decide to leave, there's no guarantee you'll still have a job to return to.
Then there's the sudden cost of a hotel room for weeks on end. Everywhere that's out of the direct path of the storm is full, I mean packed to the utter brim, no more rooms in Bethlehem and no more mangers either.
Everyone ELSE who's decided to evacuate is headed to the same spots, and these aren't luxurious destination locals. You go just far enough to get away, which sometimes puts you and your family in the middle of some podunk town that's totally not equipped to handle a massive influx of people.
So if you do find a room, which is tough, it's expensive.
If you go the shelter route, and you evacuate to a designated area, well buckle up. You're in for a few weeks of sharing cramped quarters with lord knows how many folks, all while you're unlikely to have access to things like showers or washing machines.
Then there's the drive itself. Timing an evacuation isn't just expensive, it's really tricky. Yes, for days and days we track the storm as it builds in the Atlantic and closes in on the shore. The people down south are probably more savvy at it than you realize, and for good reason! Their lives could depend on it every single summer.
But these storms are incredibly hard to predict with extreme accuracy.
The margin of land area that these storms could hit in storm projections is laughably huge at first. Then, as the week closes and the storm draws nearer, the land mass gradually narrows as possible outcomes are ruled out.
The last 4 days are where its most critical. You spend those days glued to your TV screen and your radio. Every waking minute you are on red alert, thinking about and prepping for this storm.
You have this small window of time in which you have to weigh the massive costs and stresses of evacuating against the actual level of threat posed to your life.
Actually getting on the road, if you do decide to evacuate, is STILL not a guarantee that you'll be out of danger. Once these storms make land fall, the amount of moisture they drop can cause severe flooding all the way up to Canada in the most extreme cases. So what if you run away, only to get caught in disaster somewhere else?
And then there's the tragic cases -- elderly folks too old to go through the arduous process of packing and leaving their homes in the face of a storm, and without a living relative to help them do it, or people who live hand to mouth, pay check to pay check, with not enough money to leave.
It's incredibly risky to stay, and incredibly difficult to run. And sometimes these storms come one year after another, so that if you end up evacuating one summer, you might not be in a position to do it the next, either because of finances or putting your job on the line. And then there's the ever present worry that you're going through all this hassle for no reason; for a storm that'll just fizzle out in the Gulf and veer off to hit somewhere else at the last second, which makes you less inclined to listen to the next warning, and the next.
