Storm risk: Lee, Collier hurricane evacuation times among longest in Florida

A Lee County emergency planning website showed that our region is the most difficult to evacuate in the country when faced with a major hurricane.

We have too many people and too few roads, said a county website, which was removed after The News-Press contacted county officials to discuss hurricane evacuation times. Figures from it were based on the 2010 census, the site said.

"Southwest Florida has been identified as the hardest place in the country to evacuate in a disaster due to our large population and limited road system," the site said. "What does this mean for you? You need to evacuate early, and absolutely no later than when an evacuation order is given."

Lee and Collier counties have among the longest hurricane evacuation times in the state, and the two counties are also known for being at the center of a development boom.

Critics say allowing more development in these counties, especially in flood zones, is only going to make thing worse and make a challenging task even more difficult.

"If you're loading up the coastal area with more people and not adding the equal amount of road capacity, yes," former Lee County Smart Growth director Wayne Daltry said of increased population adding to evacuation headaches.

Daltry said the state once required developments in flood zones to build the necessary road infrastructure to evacuate those communities.

"The state of Florida has gutted it's growth management tools and this is what you end up with," Daltry said of slow evacuation times. "We've had moratoriums (over these issues) but the Legislature had done as much as it could to make sure responsible communities got punished."

And although Collier County officials agreed to speak with The News-Press and Naples Daily News, Lee County referred questions to the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council's evacuation maps.

"In the case of a storm threatening Lee County requiring our residents to evacuate out of County, that evacuation would have to begin 89 hours prior to the storm force winds reaching the County," the county website read. "Think about all the things you would normally do in an 89-hour time period; it’s three and half days."

It's possible that at that stage that you could leave Southwest Florida only to get stuck on the road or run into the storm if it turns toward Miami or Tampa, the place you went for safety.

But emergency officials say they plan to move people tens of miles, not hundreds of miles.

Experts: heed hurricane evacuation orders

When emergency management says it's time to leave, leave. It can be a matter of life or death, as was the case when Ian hit in 2022.

"The people who didn't end up surviving Hurricane Ian were people who stayed," said Jim Beever, a retired planner at the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council. "It wasn't people trying to get away. And now there is very enormous development being proposed in dangerous areas as though (Hurricane) Ian won't happen again."

Each coastal county is broken up into several zones associated with flood risks. The categories start with A for the barrier islands and especially low-lying areas and extends to F for the areas that are least at risk of flooding or storm damage.

Lee County ends at the E zone while Collier has an F zone in the Immokalee area and in the eastern, rural part of the county.

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And each zone is given an evacuation timeframe, which can vary from a few hours to days, depending on how the storm approaches the coast and where exactly it hits.

For example, the out-of-county evacuation times in Lee County range from 24.5 hours for zone A to 79.5 hours for zone E, according to Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council records.

Those numbers are among the worst in the state, and Collier County isn't doing much better when it comes to quickly moving residents and visitors out of harm's way.

Collier's out-of-county times range from 20.5 hours to 75.5 hours, or more than three days, according to planning council records.

Dan Summers, director of Collier County Emergency Management Systems, said the numbers are really planning tools, not a forecast of how a storm will play out.

"They're great for planning discussion but they're not really applicable to the tactics of how we do that," Summer said. "The philosophy years ago was 'does the entire county have to evacuate?' and the answer to that is 'no.' We want you to hide from the wind and we want you to run from the water."

He said despite the hours it takes to evacuate Collier County, it's really no more dangerous to live here than anywhere else along the coast in Florida.

"This is not our first rodeo," Summers said. "We know our community and we'll manage it and we'll get through it."

He said the county learned many lessons from Ian, which slammed into the coast in 2022.

"Hurricane Ian taught us that a last-minute shift or any change in angle can bring in the storm surge that it did," Summers said. "We've talked about it for hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, but it really matters what happens during that last 10 to 12 hours. An angle shift can push that water right up on land, and it did."

Lee, Collier are among the counties with the longest evacuation times

Austen Flannery, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said planning and executing evacuations are difficult because storms are unpredictable.

For Lee and Collier counties, there are two main ways to leave: toward Tampa or toward Miami.

"Unfortunately, for somewhere like Fort Myers, there are not a whole lot of road options to get people further away from the coast," Flannery said. "You either go up Interstate 75 or across Interstate 75. There aren't a lot of really good east-west routes that can handle a large portion of the population that's trying to leave."

While winds can cause major structural damage, water is the most dangerous element in large hurricanes like Ian.

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"You're at risk from storm surge and flooding because water is the No. 1 cause of death for people," Flannery said. "It's stormwater rising or rainwater rising. So, decisions are largely based around what the waters are going to be. and get out of the area that's at risk from storm surge."

Flannery said evacuating when told to do so is the only safe response.

"You may be told to evacuate (this year)," Flannery said. "And I think everyone would rather be a little inconvenienced and alive than the other option."

Modern storms are sometimes more difficult to predict than in years past as systems have grown from named storms to deadly ones over the course of 48 hours.

"We get rapidly intensifying storms that can go from a tropical storm to a Category 5 storm in two days, and that can make decision-making very challenging," Flannery said. "A lot of times it's not a clear what's going to happen because we could know where it's going to hit but we may not know the speed, size or intensity and if anyone of those forecasts are uncertain, it makes it more difficult to have high confidence."

'We need people to pay attention'

Daltry spent many years heading up the regional planning council and said the game plan for evacuations is viable here, as long as everyone heeds the warnings when they're issued.

"After the islands are done you start winging it," Daltry said. "Someone called it the policy of least regret. Three and a half days out you're giving an advisory that they better be booking it. And a few days later you tell them to leave now because we're starting to evacuate people from other areas. It's a staged event. It's not like we go to people three-and-a-half days ahead of time and say 'you're all going to die.'"

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He said the top priority is saving lives, and that early evacuations of coastal and low-lying zones is never a bad idea when a powerful storm is approaching.

"We need people to pay attention and have people who don't care about their resumé, saying they ordered an evacuation that wasn't needed," Daltry said. "You look at the threat and you know it's 90 hours, and you have to make sure so many vehicles can get through a bottleneck at Matanzas bridge and then look at your next bottleneck and then you say 'I'd rather have them sit in a car in the rain than die in their homes.'"

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Storm risk: Lee, Collier hurricane evacuation times among longest in Florida