By Greg Allen
With the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, residents in coastal areas throughout the Southeast are once again being urged to have a plan ready if they have to evacuate.
After last year, it's a message that carries some weight. In the days before Hurricane Irma struck Florida last September, nearly seven million residents left their homes to seek shelter and safety elsewhere. Since then, emergency managers and researchers have been studying the lessons of the largest hurricane evacuation in U.S. history.
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In that case, as with Irma, the damage ultimately done by the hurricane didn't justify the massive evacuation beforehand. Bill Johnson, the director of emergency management in Palm Beach County, says nearly half of those who fled their homes for Hurricane Irma were from areas where evacuations had not been ordered.
"We have an over-evacuation problem," he says.
Emergency managers mostly order hurricane evacuations for water, not wind. In Florida, the biggest concern is storm surge. Disaster experts say rapidly rising water poses a much greater threat to property and lives than high winds. But in Hurricane Irma, researcher Jason Senkbeil says many evacuees held a different view.
"The Irma evacuees," he says, "were terrified of wind."
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