Hurricane Fun Centers Will Improve Evacuation Rates

James McAdams | July 13, 2020

One of the plot points for my novel about a rehab facility in Delray are hurricane fun centers. During the hurricane, most residents and staff of the rehab facility lose track of one another desperately going to different shelters while the orange radar blob proceeds implacably towards the east coast of FL. Some stay with family, some squeal northwest in old Corollas and Cavaliers, some hunker down in the motel’s recreation center, some, so desperate and overwhelmed, are “paralyzed by analysis” and just say where they are until they die. What we need is a motive to evacuate, something to draw people to the shelters: what we need are hurricane fun centers.

There could be a hurricane center for Trump-supports and Trump-haters, vegetarians and doe-hunters, child-friendly families and nightclubs with dark closets for kinky singles. One for Star Trek fans, one for True Crime fans, one for Fantasy Football fans. The novel features a lowly clerk named Donderback who envisions the idea of hurricane fun centers.

 

Here is an example of Hurricane Fun Centers:

“In the decades since, Donderback’s four examples (known as “Donderback’s Quadrant”) have exploded across the nation. There are now 1,000 different Donderback Shelter Convention Models (DSCM’s), ranging from NRA affiliations to Cosplay enthusiasts to religious sects to various cult and/or alternative fact communities organized around aliens, Scientology, or neo-Luddites. Evacuation rates across the country have risen from a P-D. (pre-Donderback) rate of 29% to a robust and gleaming 67% in the last year reported (2189). To this datum we must ascribe, following Donderback’s hunch, the primitive and sobering fact that the central problem of human existence is the feeling of being, and dying, alone.”

Like a lot of things in my novel, this started as a joke and now seems like a really good idea to me!