What A Day - Dispatches From Hurricane Milton Evacuees

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night along Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm. It’s expected to be one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the U.S. in more than 100 years, with sustained winds of over 120 miles an hour. As Milton moved closer to shore Wednesday, strong inland winds triggered tornado warnings across parts of Florida, and at least one tornado was reported near Fort Myers. WAD’s own Josie Duffy Rice got in contact with two friends who evacuated from western Florida ahead of the storm. Later in the show, Abrahm Lustgarten, climate reporter for ProPublica and author of the book ‘On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,’ talks about the ways climate change is reshaping how — and where — we live.And in headlines: Vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and J.D. Vance rallied supporters in Arizona, X is relaunching in Brazil, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the theme for the 2025 Met Gala exhibition.Show Notes:Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Thursday, October 10th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is What A Day, the show where, while we appreciate French President Emmanuel Macron's passionate plea to keep the show Emily in Paris in, um, Paris, after the character, spoiler alert, ends the recent season with a move to Rome. We will fight hard and we will ask them to remain Emily in Paris in Roma doesn't make sense. We're not sure that's official president business. On today's show, X is reinstated in Brazil and TikTok is in legal hot water in the U.S.

Plus, both presidential campaigns focus their attention on Arizona. But first, Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night along Florida's Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm. It is a nightmare scenario for the state. For one, the region was hit by another major storm, Helene, just two weeks ago. Many communities along Florida's Gulf Coast are still cleaning up debris. But on its own, Milton is just a massive storm. It's expected to be one of the most powerful storms to hit the U.S. in more than 100 years. The hurricane has sustained winds well over 120 miles per hour. Strong winds inland triggered

tornado warnings across parts of Florida on Wednesday, and at least one tornado was reported near Fort Myers. More than 5 million people are under evacuation orders. During a briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said emergency aid had been pre-positioned in Florida ahead of the storm's arrival. Including eight urban search and rescue teams, three U.S. Coast Guard swift water rescue teams, 15.6 million meals, 13.9 million liters of water already pre-positioned, an additional 20 million meals, and 40 million liters of water ready to deploy as needed. John Pierre said that more than 8,000 federal workers have been deployed to the region to help with the response. At a separate briefing Wednesday, President Biden insisted that

the federal government would have Florida's back. And he got emotional when a reporter asked why he thought former President Donald Trump was spreading disinformation about the federal response to Milton and Helene. I simply don't know. You can speculate, but I just find it, I've used the phrase more than I've used it ever in my whole career, un-American. It's un-American. It's not who the hell we are. What are they talking about? Buddy, I get it. And so did Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. He obviously did not criticize Trump and fellow Republicans, but did take issue with people spreading misinformation online. I think most people are wise to this. We live in an era where if you put out crap online, you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetize that. That's just the way it is.

For more, our very own Josie Duffy Rice is back. She's in Georgia with Dispatches from Western Florida. Hey, Josie. Hi. So, Josie, you have two friends in the Tampa area who evacuated, and you talked to them a little bit on Wednesday. Tell us about them and how they're doing. Yeah, so I have two friends.

The first one is my friend Julie Gerard. She lives in South Tampa. She was under mandatory evacuation orders, and she is currently in Orlando at an Airbnb with her husband, her two kids, who are both under the age of four, and her two cats. And she told me that when she found out a second major hurricane was already on the way after Helene, she kind of couldn't even, like, believe it, in part because there was still so much damage from Helene that hadn't been dealt with. You drive around and see like piles of stuff, of debris, of drywall, like wood, mattresses, couches that were flooded out and that are now unusable. It creates another layer of risk and another layer of concern. But I just feel terrible for people who are dealing with that and wondering, like,

are my belongings now projectiles? So Julie also said that before the evacuation orders came down, she and her husband were kind of considering just writing this out. The decision to leave was ultimately because my kids started to get kind of scared once they saw the hurricane shutters going up on our house. And then my husband and I were like, are we going to bring their beds downstairs? Is it safer for them to sleep on the first floor? Should we all sleep in one room, like a safe room? And at that point, it just became clear that we were considering taking a risk for really no reason because we had the ability to leave. I'm so glad they left.

I can't imagine how scary that would be preparing yourself for this kind of hurricane. Tell us about your other friend. Yeah, so my friend Nana lives in St. Petersburg, which you may know is really close to Tampa. She actually was not under a mandatory evacuation order, but she still decided to relocate further inland ahead of the storm. And she's lived in Florida for much of her life. And she says that she has noticed that the storms have gotten markedly worse just in the last few years. It really feels like the past five, six, seven years, like it's been more than just like the run of the mill hurricanes, right? Like it's like could be potentially devastating. The level of flooding is like much worse. Like I just don't remember them being this disruptive to life. Something that maybe some of our listeners are asking, and I'm definitely asking,

why not leave Florida altogether during a hurricane? Why not get to Georgia or somewhere further north? What do they have to say about that? Yeah, honestly, I think that's the instinct of so many people who are not in the region, right? And I asked them this, and I found their answers really interesting. Julie said that in 2017, she and her husband tried to leave Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma. And she said that the trip was just completely brutal. It took us like 14 hours to get where we were going, which was Montgomery, Alabama. And we were driving overnight. We couldn't find the gas. We had to take turns driving while the others slept. And that was

something that we couldn't reasonably do with two little kids. And Nana told me that it's also really hard to know what to do in these situations because the storms are so dynamic, right? And you're making decisions without a ton of information. The path could change at any second. It's really not as clear cut as people like to think that it is. So like you're making a lot of major decisions, trying to like set up your house, protect your house, check in on people, go to the store when everybody's going to the store, like in a matter of like three days. And you still don't even really know where the hurricane is going to hit.

Nana also told me that she didn't understand before why people decided not to evacuate ahead of big storms like this. But she now really does get why people decide to stay, right? Because it's really hard. And there are just really limited resources in a state that's home to 20 million people and sees multiple of these storms a season. Yeah, absolutely. Like, there are so many difficult choices to be made.

Thank you so much. And I really hope that your friends are okay. Thank you. For more on Milton's significance and the role climate change plays in intensifying these already big storms, I spoke with Abram Lustgarten. He covers climate change for ProPublica

and is author of the new book, On the Move, The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. It's about how climate change will continue to shape where we live. Abram Lustgarten, welcome to What Today. Thanks for having me. So what's the significance of seeing these kinds of major storms back to back like this? Helene, followed by Milton. I mean, these are both extraordinarily surprisingly large and devastating storms. That they're back-to-back isn't in itself unusual, but both storms exploded in size. And they did that because of the historically warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the extraordinary amount of moisture in a warmer atmosphere. So

they're driven by climate change in that sense. And climate change is making their size enormous and their intensity greater. I believe Milton grew from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in about 24 hours. Is that typical? That was never typical until a couple of years ago, but the science warned that we would begin to see this, and we have seen this over the last three, four seasons of storms that look like they might be modest or slowly developing, literally exploding in size, rapidly expanding from tropical storms into hurricanes

or from Category 1s into Category 5s. We're talking on Wednesday. By the time people are hearing this, Milton will have made landfall. How can people even begin to prepare for a situation like this? I think that heating the evacuation warnings is a smart first step. It's really not clear yet what category, what wind speeds Milton will have by the time it comes ashore. But there's no scenario that I've read that doesn't suggest it will be devastating. One question I have is that I hear all the time from folks who have never evacuated for a storm.

They made it through Hurricane Andrew or they made it through additional hurricanes that have been very devastating. But they have this idea that, like that people always overstate these storms. What's your message to people like that? Well, history has proven to be an unreliable guide to the future. So we're collectively consistently surprised by storms like Helene and storms like Milton. And if they were survivable or seemed like something you could just sort of hunker down and weather at home in the past, that's increasingly not going to be the case in the future. We're in an unpredictable era.

The Institute for Economics and Peace says there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. But I think for those of us that live in the United States, it's easy to imagine that's something that will only affect people in other countries. Your work does such a great job of illuminating the ways that climate change could be displacing a lot of people here in the United States. Can you give us a primer of what that could look like? Yeah, I took some of that global research and mapped that data for what might create climate refugees around the world and to look at what that looks like over the United States. And short stories that suggest, you know, up to 160 million Americans will face a

substantial degradation of their environment that's consistent with what makes migrants move. States. And short stories that suggest up to 160 million Americans will face a substantial degradation of their environment that's consistent with what makes migrants move. The southern third of the United States is disproportionately going to bear the brunt of all the kind of impacts that we're looking at. It's going to be the hottest. It's going to be exposed to the most sea level rise. It's going to take these hurricanes. It's going to see economic declines driven by climate change. And all of those things are linked empirically to movement of people, to demographic change. So we don't really know for sure who will move or how many will move. But the data suggests that many, many tens of millions of Americans over a long period of time,

over the next couple of decades, will probably shift northward. And at a minimum, there's 13 million Americans that currently live in places that are below future projected tidelines on our coasts. What are some things that might result from this potential mass migration that people might not be thinking about? This seems like a huge infrastructure logistics problem as well as a migration one. I'm just thinking about, like, is everybody just going to move to Michigan? Yeah, I mean, it suggests rapid change of all sorts, cultural change, infrastructure change, governance change. You know, a good guide to history is the migration of African-Americans out of the South throughout the 1900s.

And that was a migration of about six and a half to seven million people. And that had enormous implication. It really formed the kinds of identities that cities like Detroit or Philadelphia or Cleveland have today. And, you know, it led to a great amount of cultural depth through the United States that we identify with. A lot of our music and arts and so forth arose from that migration. What that means in places where people go to is real infrastructure demands, intense growth for cities, physical growth, rapid population growth that needs to be met

in terms of having services and education and public transit and housing. And unfortunately, we expect climate change to disproportionately impact communities that have been underserved historically. So, you know, it will disproportionately impact black and brown communities and poor communities. What kind of timeline are we talking about here? Or are we already here? Because we're seeing major home insurers pull out of states like Florida and California because it's just so expensive to insure homes that are at risk of natural disasters. Yeah, we are already here. I mean, we are in this process. But that's not to say that, you know, you flip a switch and all this change happens at once. We're talking about an evolution that will slowly take place, unfold over several decades.

The data windows that I look at in the physical analysis of which places are affected, they map change as soon as 2040. So some of the severe economic impacts or the most severe heat impacts that are mapped, at least according to the data that I used, are looking at 16 years from now. Some of the conclusive changes that we might summarize, as in 100 million Americans move northward, you might see that by later this century. And that might seem like a really far period into the future. But it's worth remembering that that's well within the lifetimes of people who are born today. Something that gives me some reassurance is that humans have proven themselves to be very adaptable. And we have the ability to come up with solutions to lots of problems. So are there people working on this?

Is there anything that can be done to either stop this from happening or, as I mentioned, make it possible for us to adapt? There's so much to say to that question. It starts with lowering emissions, for one, because lowering emissions still makes a really big difference. Just in terms of models of climate migration, some of the research that I look at suggests two to three billion people globally displaced by climate change. But if the Paris targets for emissions were reached, the same body of research that I referenced drops their estimate by 80%. So if we're talking about 100 million Americans displaced, maybe we can get to 30 million just by cutting our global CO2 emissions. You are seeing a lot of adaptive thinking in cities that expect to be a destination.

Cincinnati, of all places, has a really robust climate adaptation program where they're anticipating a growing population as climate migrants come in. Ann Arbor, Michigan's another example. The state of Vermont as a state is looking at this. The city of Buffalo is marketing itself as a climate haven. And what that means in these cities is when they map out their future water carrying capacity systems or

sewage treatment plants, really like mundane and uninteresting stuff, but they're building capacity for an anticipated growth that isn't necessarily in line with what their historical growth has been. Thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Abram Lustgarten. He covers climate change for ProPublica and is author of the new book, On the Move, the Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. We'll get to the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube,

and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. And now, the news. Headlines. Rather than spending all your time trying to tear people down and divide us, we need President Harris to be there to make sure you're uniting us, to find solutions together, to work across the aisle. On Wednesday, Vice Presidential Candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rallied support for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tucson, Arizona.

Walz said Harris will be a president for everyone, regardless of their politics. Harris will visit the battleground state today, where early voting is officially underway. Senator J.D. Vance was also in Tucson on Wednesday and held a dueling rally. Vance braved the Arizona heat to address his supporters. Here he is sharing an anecdote about the last time he was in the border state when he made small talk with a stranger about the 115-degree weather. Somebody said something to me on the street.

They said, well, it's okay, it's just a dry heat. And I thought, you must be a Kamala Harris voter because 115 degrees feels hot, whether it's a dry heat or a moist heat or whatever it is. I don't really get how a dry heat would make you a Harris voter, but sure. His running mate, Donald Trump,

was also busy on the campaign trail. Here he is at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, complaining about FEMA hours before Hurricane Milton was expected to make landfall. They have no funds. They have no workers. They have no nothing. FEMA, we had such a good FEMA. FEMA was great under Trump, that I can tell you. We had tremendous success. Why is he referring to himself in the third person?

I don't understand anything that's going on there. X is rebooting in Brazil. The social media platform was suspended in late August amid a dispute between the country's Supreme Court and X's owner, Elon Musk. The court said Musk failed to block users who violated the country's regulations, which aimed to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech. But the court lifted the ban on X on Tuesday. A panel of justices released a statement saying that millions of users can log back on

now that Musk has complied with its orders and other stipulations to operate in Brazil, one of which included a $3 million fine. So in the end, Elon Musk totally backed down in the face of a tougher actor. Huh. Attorneys general from 14 states sued TikTok this week, alleging that the social media app is harmful to young people who use it. The suit is led by Attorney General Rob Bonta of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but the collective group includes both Republican and Democratic states. Here's Bonta speaking at a press conference on Tuesday. They have built a business model centered on exploiting young people's time, attention, and well-being.

They have promoted a platform and a business model that preys on the proclivity of young people to use the TikTok platform in a way that's addictive, excessive, and compulsive. TikTok responded in a statement basically saying none of the claims are true, and they, quote, remain deeply committed to all of the work we've done to protect teens. Earlier this year, Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok from the U.S. unless its Chinese owner ByteDance sells the platform. That case is still pending. And finally, we'll give you the gift of thinking about something fun happening in the future, after the election. On Wednesday, the Met Gala announced its theme for its 2025 exhibit, Superfine, Tailoring Black Style,

all about the evolution of black men's fashion from the 18th century to today. This is the first time the gala has ever done a fashion exhibit focused entirely on menswear. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the theme is inspired by Monica L. Miller's book Slaves to Fashion, Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Musician and producer Pharrell Williams, Formula One superstar Lewis Hamilton, actor Coleman Domingo,

and rapper A$AP Rocky will co-chair the event with Anna Wintour. NBA legend LeBron James will serve as an honorary chair. The actual gala theme will be announced next year. And that's the news. I've been thinking about this a bunch lately. See, for the first time in decades, the adult obesity rate in the United States has declined by about two percentage points.

You might be thinking, hey, that sounds like good news. But much like how the same people who screamed at me about how teen pregnancy was a moral scourge are now very worried about studies finding that teens are not having sex, apparently good news is not permitted to be good news. Because while the causes of the decline are likely numerous, one factor is the use of semaglutide medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Semaglutide medications work in part by reducing hunger signals and slowing down the process by which your stomach empties after you eat. While Ozempic is indicated for people with type 2 diabetes as it can reduce blood sugar, the FDA approved Wegovy for weight loss. There are side effects for some people,

and it doesn't work for everyone. But that's not why some people are mad about it, like Russell Brand on TikTok. What is this new obesity drug, a Zempik, and what's the story behind it? And why is it dangerous, Kelly? The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is what sets the guidelines for pediatrics in this country, is actually a wholly owned subsidiary of pharma. The majority of their funding comes from pharma. Okay, Russell Brand, calm down. I get it.

Pharmaceutical companies do lots of potentially sketchy stuff. But some agglutide has been in use for more than a decade, and so far indications are that it's pretty safe. And I don't actually think that's why people are mad about Ozempic. And I don't think they're mad because you need to take it forever, because guess what you need to do if you diet to lose weight? I think they're mad about Ozempic and Bagovi because people tend to get really mad at fat people,

even for how they decide to lose weight. Like this woman who spoke to Good Morning America. You get shamed for being overweight and then you start losing the weight. You're shamed for losing the weight. If you're fat or have ever been fat, you know that fat has what I would call a moral valence in a lot of places. A series of studies performed in 2019 with American, British, and Indian subjects found that participants believed fat people were less evolved and less human than thin people. And many people seem to believe that fat people should have to suffer as they stop being fat to

prove they're not bad people. You can tell folks feel this way because they'll use the phrase, the easy way out, to refer to using Ozempic or Regovi. They did the same thing when gastric bypass surgery became more widely used. The point is not that surgery or Ozempic are easy, because they absolutely aren't, but that weight loss is supposed to be hard, so that you'll what? Learn a lesson from it? Why? Thin people are not morally superior to fat people. Being fat doesn't mean you're a bad person and being thin doesn't inherently mean you're a moral paragon. And if you want to lose weight, you are totally permitted to use medications that work for you if you want to. Because your body is yours alone. It's not a sign of your morality, nor is an indicator of just how good a person you are. It's just you. One more thing before we go. Being first lady has always been a tricky role, and being the first first gentleman could be even trickier. On the latest episode of Inside 2024, Hysteria's Aaron Ryan sat

down with Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, to discuss the role of first ladies in a campaign and Doug Emhoff's potential historic new role. To get access to this exclusive series and more, head to crooked.com slash friends to sign up now. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, donate to a hurricane relief fund, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just Emmanuel Macron's desperate Emily in Paris-related pleas like me, what it is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. Thanks for listening.

What a day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded by Jarek Centeno and mixed by Bill Lance. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Bye.