Sanford issues voluntary evacuation order – Local – Myrtle Beach Sun News.
What’s a voluntary order? This is one of the more amusing things I’ve heard about the storm that really isn’t, but the media really, REALLY wants it to be. They’re hoping that it’ll get back to hurricane force winds, though the prognosis isn’t very good for that to happen, especially considering that Hanna continues to weaken.
And as he was announcing the order, even the Governor had to reiterate that it was voluntary. So why give the order in the first place? How about issuing an advisary? Or a suggestion? But it has to be an order to make it sound important, even if it doesn’t have any meat to it and most people are going to ignore it anyway.
And the best part:
Gov. Mark Sanford just told beachside South Carolinians in Horry and Georgetown counties that if they feel more comfortable getting out of the wind and rain forecast for the next 36 hours, they can begin to evacuate.
So South Carolinians needed to be told by the governor that it’s ok for them to evacuate. Thank God he said this, because people might have been forced to STAY if they weren’t comfortable with being in the storms path. Yeeesh. Have we become so dependent on the state that we can no longer take our safety into our own hands?
The answer is: of course not.
So far, we have the Governor issuing the voluntary order, the local schools closing up shop for the day as well as the local university, and yet everyone I talked to today was pretty much unfazed with this storm. As usual, it’s a matter of the tail wagging the dog, as the media is trying to make something out of this. And as a result, it’s forcing the government to make sure it doesn’t look bad with the media. In fact, it’s IKE that the people I talked to today are more worried about than Hanna, but that would require long term planning, something the drive-bys are uninterested in doing.
Meanwhile, while the local government employees will get their day off, I’ll be making the drive to the beach, like I do everyday. Except they have me going from SOUTH to NORTH, instead of NORTH to SOUTH like I normally do. Which makes no sense, but the bureaucratic dictates of someone two hundred miles away and has probably never done the drive before must be obeyed. So I have to do something useless and more likely to be problematic, just because someone thinks they have a better idea of how to do my job than the person who has done the job for the past year. Just like pretty much every bureaucracy.
And I’m sure they also didn’t think that this would force me into the major evacuation route instead of driving against it. But they wouldn’t think about important details like that. So I’ll probably be stuck in traffic on US 501 or US 378 tomorrow, all because some genius in middle management came up with a great idea.
The Highwayman 