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I mean there's definitely not an estimate for how many would die without ordinary emergency response efforts. We're talking about basic food-clean water-medicine issues for a very large group of people, there will be many deaths if responses are too delayed among the elderly or otherwise frail.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, it seems easy to avoid death from hurricanes. If the broad path of the hurricane is known, then the city should be able to evacuate within a couple of days.
Dunno if this one is an exception, but I believe hurricanes are routine occurrences in this region. Neighboring cities should be able to preemptively provide shelter to the fleeing populace. 5-10 stadiums can hold ~200-500k people. The west coast deals with wildfires, and routinely evacuates entire cities with no reported deaths.
The economic damage is another story. But loss of human life should be avoidable.
NHC had predicted the Karina would make landfall near New Orleans, about three days in advance of its actual landfall on August 29. Sandy's exact landfall (in New Jersey on October 29) and the storm surge threat were solidly predicted about four to five days in advance.
In either case, broad predictions were made a full week in advance and precise impact zones were predicted with 3 days to go.
What am I missing here? Surely the death toll should have been a lot lower ?
In the case of Helene, it got all the way into parts of western North Carolina that haven't had flooding of this magnitude since 1916 and absolutely do not routinely experience this type of disaster. I believe they have a lot more experience with snowstorms.
If we were talking about the eastern half of the state this would be very different.
That's rare!
I can see why the locals might not have evacuated in time.
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At the risk of sounding insensitive, do you know anything about this hurricane? Evacuating the entire "broad path" of the hurricane would mean evacuating an area about 600 miles long and 200 miles wide that includes several major cities such as Tallahassee, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Evacuating at least 10 million people potentially hundreds of miles on short notice isn't exactly easy, or even desirable.
No, they aren't. Asheville is in the western part of North Carolina, at least 250 miles from the nearest coastline.
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