What if you can’t afford to flee a hurricane?
Even when a life-threatening hurricane is headed your way, there are many reasons why you might stay put. You might have dependent family members who can’t leave due to disabilities or other health-related reasons; you might not have reliable transportation to get to a safer area, and what’s more, no gas to get there. Sometimes, you simply refuse to leave your home and everything you own behind.
There’s also the reality of just not being able to afford it.
In a 2021 University of South Florida survey, over half of the state’s residents said that finances would impact whether they evacuated from a hurricane or not, with almost 43 percent saying they had under $1,000 for emergencies. People escaping both Hurricane Milton and Helene — a Category 4 hurricane that heavily impacted the Southeastern US in late September — report spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get to safety.
Connie Vickers, 63, typically resides about an hour outside of Asheville, North Carolina. It cost her about $5,000 to book the first available Airbnb she could find to evacuate from Hurricane Helene. She considers herself fortunate — she could pay that out of pocket, with the hope that her insurance would cover some or all of the cost. “I’ve been thinking about the socioeconomic differences,” she tells Vox. “Some people literally have nothing.”
Terrifyingly, anecdotes of people seeing outrageous flight, hotel, and rental car prices have spread like wildfire on social media in the lead-up to Hurricane Milton’s landfall as a Category 3 storm.
On TikTok, one woman in Southwest Florida has been explaining why it’s so difficult to leave home with six children and four dogs. Many shelters don’t accept pets. “I would have to book an Airbnb or something,” she says in one video. “I can’t afford to do that.”
Flights, hotels, or gas can be pricey — if they’re even available
The longer someone waits to evacuate, the costlier evacuation is likely to be. One 2011 study estimated that evacuation costs for a Category 3 hurricane could increase from $454 about 3 days before expected landfall to $526 mere hours before landfall, which is about $632 to $732 in today’s dollars. While the cheapest one-way flight from Tampa to Atlanta in mid-November can be had for just $39, according to Google Flights, on October 8, the cheapest the search engine showed was $321. The cheapest one-way ticket from Tampa to NYC, usually available for $45 to $90, was $458.
Plane tickets are priced dynamically, typically shooting up during busy travel periods and when you’re booking last minute. A United spokesperson told Vox that the airline had implemented fare caps this past Sunday. “Since then, the average price for a one way, economy class ticket to our hubs from affected Florida markets was below $500,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. They also noted that the viral screenshots of $1,000-plus fares from Tampa to St. Louis included two stops. By early Tuesday, though, it was hard to find any nonstop flights from Tampa. Delta and American Airlines have also capped fares.
Whether these tickets actually existed is also a different matter — going directly to airline websites often showed that there were actually no available flights, since airports were closed and many flights had been canceled. By Tuesday, when many evacuation orders were just going into effect, options were increasingly limited — and costly — for Floridians in the path of Milton. Many airports were closing down. As of Wednesday, FlightAware data showed that 90 percent of flights out of Tampa International Airport were canceled.
Rental car locations were either running out of cars or shutting down for safety as of Tuesday, and according to GasBuddy, a site that helps people track prices and availability at nearby gas stations, fuel was scarce. Finding a place to stay is an uphill climb, too. At time of writing, many hotels in Northwest Florida had filled up. While there are free shelters available across Florida counties where evacuation orders have been issued, as well as free shuttle services or other free transportations options, not everyone may be in an area where they can access them. There are also several reasons why people choose not to go to a shelter: They may not be sure exactly where it’s located, whether it’s full, or may not be able to bring their pets.
Being poor and having few job protections makes it harder to escape a storm
People with the least money are also often least likely to be able to escape a natural disaster. They are less able to leave work in advance to beat traffic or book lodgings and flights before they’re all sold out, and in the long-term, less able to permanently move to an area at lower risk of hurricanes — yet another example of how it can be more expensive to be poor. The Gulf Coast faces some of the highest poverty rates in the US, and the combination of extreme poverty and higher rates of poor health (often due to racial inequality and environmental factors) leaves residents in this region especially vulnerable during disasters.
Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center at University of Colorado Boulder, is currently studying the factors that motivate people to evacuate and shelter — or not — for hurricanes and tornadoes. “A huge one is resource constraints,” she tells Vox. “You have to have lodging wherever you’re going. You may need to have social support, potentially, if you want to stay with family and friends who are outside of the area. You have to have the ability to leave your job.”
Even in ordinary times, hotel and flight prices can be tough to stomach. Average hotel prices in the US have risen this year; across the country, it has become increasingly common to pay upwards of $200 per night for a room. The cost of buying a car, maintaining it, and having insurance for it has also gone up precipitously in the past few years. Then there are the higher food prices to consider. If you’ve evacuated to temporary lodgings and don’t have a stove, eating out can quickly become costly.
Over a quarter of Americans had less than $500 in their checking account last year, according to a CNBC Select survey, and over half of Americans have less than $1,000 saved for emergencies. A Fox Business report from 2017 estimated that hurricane preparation and evacuation could cost an average family as much as $5,000; a New York Times report from 2018, when Hurricane Florence ravaged North Carolina, cites one family having to cough up over $2,000 to evacuate. It can be prohibitively expensive to survive a storm.
For some, the risk of lost wages or other consequences of missing work may have influenced their decision to stay put. During Hurricane Helene, a factory called Impact Plastics in Erwin, Tennessee, allegedly told employees to continue working despite flood warnings in the area. The company denies that it discouraged employees from leaving, saying in a video statement last week that they had been told to leave “at least 45 minutes before the gigantic force of the flood hit the industrial park.” It’s currently being investigated after 11 workers went missing, at least five of whom have since been found dead.
How the government — and some companies — are trying to help
To ease some of the costs of evacuation, the state of Florida has suspended road tolls and has encouraged hotels to waive pet fees. Uber, which famously came under fire for surge pricing in New York during Hurricane Sandy, is giving people fleeing Milton free rides to shelters. Major US airlines, including United, American, and Delta are waiving some fees if you need to rebook a flight. A few hotels have also been offering “distress rates” for evacuees, with one Myrtle Beach resort charging as little as $39 per night before taxes, and rooms at an Orlando area hotel chain starting at $69 before taxes.
The supply-and-demand explanation for why things like flights and hotels can cost more during emergencies is that a lot of people are trying to snap them up at the last minute. That doesn’t mean it’s in a company’s best interest to hike prices, especially when people have been airing their sticker shock online. In some cases, it could even be illegal price gouging.
“Price gouging is different than a normal market increasing prices,” says Teresa Murray, director of the Consumer Watchdog office at the Public Interest Research Groups. It usually needs to occur during some kind of emergency, and only applies to essential goods. One clear example of price gouging, according to Murray, happened during the baby formula shortage in 2022.
Right now, 37 states have some sort of anti-price gouging law in the books. Florida’s anti-price gouging law doesn’t kick in unless an official state of emergency has been declared, which Gov. Ron DeSantis did this past weekend. If the price of food, water, or gas, for example, “grossly exceeds” the average prices seen in the 30 days before the state of emergency, that’s illegal — but it’s not clear what “grossly exceeds” exactly means. Some states set a price increase threshold, such as anything more than 10 percent above normal prices. The Florida attorney general’s office has urged residents to report any price gouging they see; it was already investigating potential price gouging after receiving hundreds of complaints during Hurricane Helene. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on X that the Department of Transportation is “keeping a close eye on flights in and out of areas affected by Hurricane Milton” to ensure there’s no price gouging, and the department is now in touch with airlines about the issue.
Typically, Murray adds, we see a lot of price gouging — whether it’s water, food, or supplies needed for clean up and repair, like chainsaws — happening in the aftermath of a disaster. With Milton, too, we might see more of it occurring as recovery efforts begin. “It’s just unconscionable that some companies might be taking advantage of this crisis by jacking up their prices,” Murray says. “We’re talking about people’s lives here.”