For some evacuation defiers, Hurricane Milton is a social media goldmine

On the afternoon of October 10, author and influencer Caroline Calloway texted me “I lived bitch.” She posted a screenshot of the same proof-of-life selfie and message on her Instagram story that morning after Hurricane Milton made landfall. 

We’d spoken one day earlier about Calloway’s decision not to evacuate for the monster of a storm, as well as to post about that choice on social media, and at one point I asked if she thought she was going to die. 

“Someday,” she told me, “We all are.”

Yes, she was aware of the massive storm surges Milton would bring in its wake that would likely wash away parts of the state. She knew it would inflict a wretched amount of emotional and monetary damage. For now, we don’t know Milton’s total devastation, but as it stands at least 14 people are dead and 3 million people are without power. Milton also spawned “dozens” of tornadoes across the state, according to the Associated Press.

“It was a really hard choice to stay or to go. And I didn’t make it lightly,” she told me, “But you know, if I can be of service in terms of entertainment on the internet? So be it.” 

Calloway isn’t the only Floridian evacuation refuser who’s posting through it. On TikTok in particular, there are plenty. There’s the woman who told her followers that she was instructed to have enough food and water for three days and has decided that she will have “some kind of barbecue” (she posted that she was safe on Thursday evening). There’s a Floridian celebrity who goes by the name “Lt. Dan” who safely rode out the storm on his boat. And then there’s the woman who did not want to leave her gigantic concrete house because she wanted to “save” it and partly because her staying would, in her words, “piss” liberals off. (Her account now shows up as “banned” on TikTok.)  

People defying evacuation orders isn’t a new phenomenon. But getting millions of views on TikTok for doing so is. So why are these people staying? And why are they posting? 

The psychology behind staying and posting through a hurricane

One of the most important things to know about StormTok is that having the ability to leave and deciding to stay behind is a choice that most people who do not evacuate don’t have.

“The real story is that most people who don’t evacuate can’t evacuate. Evacuation is expensive,” Dave Call, a meteorologist and storm chaser based at Ball State University, tells me. Call explains scenarios in which people can’t take off from work, can’t afford hotels, don’t have reliable transportation, and can’t afford meals. Factors like not being able to speak English and being an undocumented immigrant also affect those contingency plans. Evacuation isn’t a feasible option for these people, and we rarely see their stories, Call stresses. 

Being able to stay and share what’s happening is essentially a luxury. 

Call chases tornadoes, and he explains that there’s a slight difference between what storm chasers do and what these hurricane posters are getting at, even if they’re both technically documenting storms. 

“These people are different from tornado chasers because they aren’t driven by a desire to see exciting weather, but by other factors,” Call says. “They may not comprehend the scale of a hurricane. Some have put their lives into their home and feel that it is safe enough. There’s also overlap between these folks and those who drive through flood waters, refuse to shelter in storms, drive recklessly, etc.”

What Call is getting at is that there is a multitude of factors that goes into the psychological decision of staying in place and sticking out a hurricane like Milton. Barbara Millet, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, echoes that sentiment. Part of Millet’s research has focused on disaster communication and how the public understands the dangers and risk of hurricanes. 

“Evacuation decisions are complex. They’re multifaceted and they’re personal. There’s no single reason, but rather a combination of factors that really influence individuals and families,” Millet tells Vox. 

She explains that these factors range from money to past experiences with hurricane evacuations to uncertainty about the forecast, to the perception that being at home might be safer. Disaster fatigue, the exhaustive process of rebuilding, the lack of trust in lawmakers and officials, and everything in between can affect someone’s decision not to obey evacuation protocols. 

“Maybe all these reasons don’t apply to any one given person, but there’s certainly a combination of them that influence people’s decisions to — or not to — evacuate,” Millet adds. 

If there’s a reassuring aspect to these extremely viral videos of people hunkering down and ignoring evac orders, it’s that the reasons and motivations they’re citing line up with research. Scientists know that factors like expenses and lack of trust in officials are why people don’t evacuate and have been figuring out better ways to address those concerns. 

“The reasons that they were giving are the same reasons that turn up in most of our surveys. None of the stated reasons were a surprise in those videos,” says Cara Cuite, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies risk and emergency communication. What caught Cuite and her colleagues by surprise was how popular the videos became. They wondered if that engagement could be another driving force in people’s decision-making.

“Seeing these videos raises the question of whether there is a counterproductive incentive to stay and not evacuate in the form of driving engagement to people’s accounts,” Cuite adds. “We don’t know if that’s happening, but it certainly raises that question.” 

In that same vein, what worries Millet and Call is that people posting their refusals to evacuate and garnering millions and millions of views in the process could be one of those factors that may sway someone else’s decision from evacuating to staying put. 

“Social media provides official information to be communicated to a larger group of people, but it also allows for unofficial information and misinformation to be communicated, and that’s what worries me most,” Millet tells me. “Misinformation and how that impacts people’s ability to take decisions, actions that they need to take.” 

Why people are turning the hurricane into content 

Calloway’s decision to stay wasn’t prompted by a lack of information. She explained that she had been following Milton and all the news surrounding the storm but that mitigating factors like her inability to drive and her desire to care for older neighbors kept her staying put. She also details that her experience evacuating in 2022 for Ian also shaped her decision. 

“I decided the right thing for me and my immediate community was to stay,” Calloway told me. “They’re my first priority.” 

She explains that she had previously honored evacuation protocols for Hurricane Ian in 2022, fleeing to her mother’s house inland in Northport, Florida, and ended up needing a military rescue anyway. She added that she’s on the third floor of her concrete condo and that she has hurricane-proof windows.

She does admit that with all these posts, she is hoping to promote her latest project (“I’m going to be trapped inside for two days anyway — let’s sell some books. That’s sort of my attitude.”) which happens to be a book about survival. Judging by the many posts about whether or not Calloway would survive the hurricane, ironic admiration for Calloway’s insistence on promoting her new book, and the attention her posts from Milton’s eye have garnered, she successfully provided the internet with some form of entertainment. She’s also no stranger to the dangers of misinformation, including rumors of her living on the ground floor of her condo, which she says were made up by a “fucking idiot who’s blind.”

It’s not lost on Calloway that there’s a certain schadenfreude or a grim morbidity from people online watching her post, that much of this attention was glibly predicated on her possible demise. 

The way the stubborn stayers on social media are consumed and recirculated speaks to both society’s rubber-necking and many viewers’ judgments about the posters’ reality. That these Floridians had the money and resources to leave and chose to stay rubs people the wrong way, but it also gets them very invested. 

We can’t help but be curious about the implied before-and-after picture of it all. Some want to see if the lady’s concrete house gets wrecked or the woman having a barbecue in the wake of a storm surge realizes amid standing water that burgers and dogs are the last thing on her mind. 

There’s also the fact that, as Call, the meteorologist and storm chaser, points out, it’s simply hard to comprehend living in the destructive aftermath of a hurricane. Parts of Florida are still soaked from Helene, and it’s unclear how many days or even weeks Milton will leave the swaths of the state without electricity. Milton is going to strain Florida in ways that TikTok can’t capture. 

“Rebuilding from a hurricane is measured in years,” Call says. 

That’s the part we don’t see and that won’t get millions and millions of views.