The suggestions at https://www.ready.gov should be considered a starting point, as they assume that relief will arrive sooner than recent storms have proven.
EDIT: Get your off-site backup started so you'll have time to Fed-Ex it out of town. If you have a business, make sure your employees will be fine, then start your continuity plans. Which should include some cash to pay bills in case the power goes out (no ATMs, no card machines).
That being said, I fully expect it to make landfall near where I live at category 5 strength, despite the current projections of "merely" a category 4 when it reaches us.
Let's look at the scenarios for evacuating the state.
If I leave now (without any vehicle to my name), I'd need to arrange for a car rental. Assuming any vehicles are even available to be driven out of the state, and they'd rent one to someone who is half-blind and doesn't have a driver's license, by the time I got into one, I'd be looking at several days of traffic jams and statewide gas shortages. The odds of being stuck on the road when the hurricane hits is too significant to ignore, and I'd rather be in a house than a car.
Then I would need a place to go. AirBNB, hotels, etc. are all expensive as hell, and probably saturated with evacuees.
Finally, I need to do all that while taking more time off of work than I am allowed to take every year, which calls two things into question:
1. How will I pay for the evacuation and stay?
2. Will I even have a job after all this? (I work remote.)
Evacuation sounds good in theory, but honestly, it's not so simple.
In the off-chance that the storm kills me: Pragmatically speaking, I'm basically a nobody who has done practically nothing noteworthy, so no one outside my immediate circle of friends will care (if they even know). I encourage everyone in the path of the storm, all of whom probably matter to the community much more than I ever will, to make their own decisions and not follow my example.
You've done at least one noteworthy thing: you posted the above comment. I, for one, noticed.
Good luck to you.
You'll be in my thoughts and prayers this week. Stay safe
[UPDATE:] Just saw this:
http://www.businessinsider.com/hurricane-irma-evacuation-jet...
In terms of life lost, evacuating would have been a disaster. You'd have had gridlocked interstates underwater.
Mayor Turner absolutely made the right call by not evacuating. Living in Houston, I'm probably a bit biased, but I find the criticism he's received for making the decision not to evacuate a bit absurd.
If a panic had ensued from an evac order? Honestly, I believe thousands would have died from the roads flooding and being trapped in their cars. It would have been a living nightmare, more than it already was.
(Greg Abbott, on the other hand, did recommend evacuation. I can only assume he did this because his only purpose for existence is to be a gigantic piece of shit, and ruin people's lives in any way he can, but whatever.)
The mayor of Houston picked the best of a number of bad options. Evacuating would have almost certainly resulted in several times the number of casualties. Harvey intensified very quickly, and by the time the threat was clear, it was too late to cut and run. You would have had freeways turned into parking lots, which would then be under 10' of water.
At first I thought he didn't make the right decision then history shows that a few weeks after Katrina another storm prompted an evacuation. Many more died then evacuating.
Not that this would ever fly in Texas where if the government tells you to do something it's just them interfering in your life.
Cuba has this down to a science. America has no clue what it's doing. The contrast is astounding.
Also Hn: let's make a detailed enough list of the exact medical condition of every household in the country that we can evacuate everyone more than X vulnerable in a few days.
Unrelated: you're aware Cuba has roughly the population of NYC, right?
Cuba has a fairly large population and very limited resources which makes their system all the more impressive. Their system is worth studying, as if Cuba of all countries can do it, surely the US can: http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-lesson-for-the-us-cubas-respo...
> Cuba’s intersectoral preparedness and response to hurricanes, which include education, drilling and how the country’s relatively small civil defense force is deployed at provincial, municipal and local community levels when a storm is first detected.
The US response seems to be ignoring the experts, blaming the victims, and trying to profit from the resulting mess.
Though of course "can" in a technical sense and "can" in a political sense are worlds apart.
The only _successful_ evacuation of a major metropolitan area (>3mil) in <1month was the khymer rogue. But as they were using brutal violence and took >20k causalities so it is hard to call that successful.
Example: Street Parade Zurich, attended by about a million people. Virtually all of those people arrive by train immediately before the event, and are gone the next day. Watching > 100k people pour out of a train station in less than an hour is really a spectacle. Remember that Zurich is not a huge city in the first place.
Example: Paris goes on holiday. All-but-literally everybody leaves Paris for summer holiday, pretty much simultaneously. You don't know what an urban evacuation means until you've witnessed this.
I bet not even Europe or China can figure out how to suddenly house/feed a million people who had to evacuate from a city for a few days, or even overnight.
Evacuation are very different from attending work, or attending a festival. Namely... You plan to return to your home/apartment/etc. and your belongs will still be present. There isn't the threat of death.
Furthermore Evacuations require moving people who often _don't_ have the ability to travel on their own. Rather by choice, or socio-economic pressures i.e.: poverty, or limited parking in city centers. Therefore attendance to work/events for these people is normally just walking a handful of blocks, or using public transit which become limited when dealing with evacuations.
This is a great read as to why:
https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6wcpt0/la_vita_bella_n...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba_Emergency_Response_System
This isn't really true anymore. For example, 95% of homes on St. Martin were destroyed by Hurricane Luis in 1995, because everyone lived in wooden houses. From that point on, the law mandated concrete buildings, and now all but the very poorest people live in houses impervious to hurricanes.
The exceptions are places like Haiti, where folks are simply too poor to afford basic hurricane mitigation. But where people can prepare, they have prepared.
I'm from Austin, and have lived in Tokyo, and I used to joke while in Tokyo you'd go stir-crazy missing trees and greenery, despite the large parks there; in Houston you go crazy missing hills and topography if you're used to it.
Suffering a stalled storm is not what you can really plan for. the water simply had no where to go.