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As FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said recently, the swirl of misinformation is “absolutely the worst that I have ever seen.” “Misinformation is not uncommon in disasters. They come on fast. People see things that don’t end up being true,” Juliette Kayyem, a crisis management expert at Harvard who served as the assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, told Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram. “I think in many ways what we’re experiencing now is purposeful lying.” Kayyem is also the author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Sean Rameswaram For people who may have missed this disaster of facts, can you just tell them what’s going on? Juliette Kayyem If you look on social media, at the atmosphere of response, there’s a lot of false facts about how the Biden administration is responding, about basic disaster response capabilities and rules. They are then amplified by, in particular, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and create their own reality that then has to be shot down by already-overburdened first responders, emergency managers, and FEMA, which has put up a rumor page on their website just to combat this crap. One example is Donald Trump consistently saying that the money that should go to Americans who are impacted by the disaster was all used for housing illegal immigrants. Not true. There was a separate line item to support migrants and sheltering that Congress passed. That money was sent to FEMA to administer, but it wasn’t replacing disaster management funds. It didn’t even overlap. It’s just the same entity distributing these funds. This creates a false division between the immigrants, who are not getting this money, and Americans, who might be mad that the money that they want for disaster relief is not available. They demoralize emergency managers and volunteers. They put them at risk. I have talked to people at FEMA about what’s happening on the ground. They are deploying people in larger numbers because they’re worried about what the reaction will be. Most importantly, it’s confusing victims about what they should do, what they have access to, and what’s available to them. Sean Rameswaram You’re saying that Donald Trump is perpetrating some of this misinformation. Where is he doing it? Juliette Kayyem At his rallies; on social media. Recently at a rally, he suggested that resources weren’t going to red states, that more Republicans were dying. There’s just no factual basis for it. What’s interesting is you’re seeing Republican governors push back on that narrative, saying that they are getting the resources they want. They know that they have to work with the federal government to protect their citizens and begin these recoveries. One of the most obnoxious, disgusting rumors being amplified out in the communications space involves whether FEMA would take your home. FEMA has a process where they can buy your home. It’s a very small program. It’s if you, the homeowner, and FEMA agree on a fair market value and you don’t want to live there anymore because it’s been flooded four years in a row, and this is a rational transactional decision. This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies. Sean Rameswaram And you’re saying this is being amplified not only by other Republican politicians, but by the owner of Twitter? Juliette Kayyem Yes. He is probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false. What they’re trying to do is create divisions in communities in two ways. One is the divide between the citizen and government, which has always been a tactic by that wing of MAGA-ism. Then also [there’s the divide] between citizens and their neighbors. That creates chaos, confusion, and divisions. I think why you’re seeing such a concerted pushback by GOP governors, but also by FEMA and others who are calling this out, is because they know it can harm their response capabilities. I should say this is being done at a time when we’re seeing our very communication networks under stress. Communications are down. It’s hard to communicate with people. And so they have that vacuum being filled by this noxiousness of which has life-and-death consequences. Sean Rameswaram Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over? Juliette Kayyem It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.” Twitter’s moment of birth, the moment that its founder realized its benefit, was during a minor earthquake in San Francisco. It had been just one of those other social media platforms. But it was that real-time, authenticated information that was flowing in people’s feeds that the leadership at Twitter began to take its responsibility in a disaster very seriously. You had an entire system, including the government relying on Twitter to amplify good information, and that whole system is down. This is the first domestic disaster where that is entirely clear, that Twitter is broken across the board for disaster management. Sean Rameswaram Is the mis- and disinformation around Milton as bad as that we saw after Helene? Juliette Kayyem You saw it more online than, say, from political leadership. You saw much more aggressive government [and] FEMA pushback on that. They were sort of ready now. Helene was — I think they were sort of caught [by surprise]. So you saw just a lot of outreach, a lot of push back on the misinformation and even from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, who pushed back on some of that. Sean Rameswaram Do you think this makes an agency like FEMA more prepared for the next hurricane and for the next storm, if you will, of misinformation? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, I think it will, on the misinformation and the lies front. I think it’s just going to be part of your emergency management plan. You’re going to push back on the rumors in a very formal way. It used to be done, but it was very piecemeal. I saw language coming out of FEMA spokespeople, which I’d never seen before, essentially just calling out the lies, in particular on social media. So they’re using the language, the sort of freewheeling language, of social media, which I think is important, rather than the sort of more formal language of government. Sean Rameswaram I think from the hype around Milton, there was this sense that, like, it could destroy Tampa. And it’s early yet, but I don’t think that happened. Do you think that sort of confirms and fuels this misinformation engine after an event like this? Juliette Kayyem Yeah, it will be viewed as overreach, as “the government’s incompetent, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.” I think the next evacuation will be harder if you don’t see the kind of damage and the kind of death that everyone was worried about. This is something that’s common, it has a name: the preparedness paradox. If you are ready, you get houses ready, you get communities ready, you get them to evacuate, and the thing comes through and the damage is less than you were worried about — that’s why you wanted the evacuation. That’s why you wanted the houses to be ready. People will say, “What were you so worried about in the first place?“ In other words, the government’s reaction, which may have minimized harm and damage and death, may very well, paradoxically, be viewed as the government’s original assessment was wrong. Sean Rameswaram Could FEMA be doing a better job during Helene and now Milton? Juliette Kayyem It’s hard for me to know right now. In some ways, FEMA’s biggest challenge is going to be recovery. How quickly can they deploy resources? In Helene, the biggest lesson learned is how we communicate risk to Americans who may not view themselves at risk. Looking back, the only warnings that were given were a flood warning given to communities where there could be a flood. 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What if you can’t afford to flee a hurricane?

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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.”

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Incarcerated people are uniquely vulnerable during natural disasters. Hurricane Milton made that clear.

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(Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations. As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision. The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.” The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues. The Florida Department of Corrections (DOC), which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time. The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm … timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.” In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported. Really important rundown of how Florida prisons and jails are responding to evacuation orders by @elizabethweill and @EthanSCorey. Several facilities in places with mandatory evacuation orders told The Appeal they will not evacuate. Interactive map here: https://t.co/EbC5XXv4YV https://t.co/Wl8aOOpQu4 pic.twitter.com/AEPjebzmX4— Meg O'Connor (@megoconnor13) October 9, 2024 Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk. “We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.” Incarcerated people have few protections Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled. Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive. “The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored … when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.” Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation. “That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox. And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability. As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets. Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources — proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself. As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.) The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters. “I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

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