‘Hurricane fatigue’ sets in as Gulf Coast eyes Ike

New Orleans residents may balk
The reluctance to leave didn't surprise Hugh Gladwin, the director of the Institute for Public Opinion Research at Florida International University, who has studied evacuations in Florida and after Hurricane Katrina.

"Yes, there's always a certain number of people who won't evacuate no matter what: they're fatalistic — they like being in hurricanes," Gladwin said.

Gladwin said he's never seen more than 80 percent evacuation participation anywhere, even with the biggest and scariest hurricane bearing down. And it can be harder to get people to leave when they've evacuated recently.

That's the case in New Orleans, where many of the 2 million people who fled the Louisiana coast ahead of Gustav had only just returned from arduous evacuation. In many cases, jammed highways turned routine trips to such evacuee havens as Birmingham and Memphis into 15-hour crawls.

Some New Orleans residents were already digging in their heels ahead of Ike.

David Myers, a 39-year-old physician who rode out Gustav with relatives in Baton Rouge before returning home to New Orleans on Tuesday, said it would take a Category 4 or 5 storm to chase him away again. He expects many other residents who ran from Gustav to balk at evacuating for Ike.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said so-called "hurricane fatigue" should not prevent people there from leaving their homes for the second time in 10 days.

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"We are likely going to have to become accustomed to evacuating more frequently than when we were younger," he said.

Christopher Gargiule, 37, said evacuating for Gustav cost him and his wife, Joanne, more than $1,500, and that they can't afford to leave again even if Ike forces another mandatory evacuation of the city. And they live in a house just 50 yards from a levee that had water splash over it during Gustav.

"We're going to have to hunker down and cross our fingers," Gargiule said.

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