What if everyone in Florida had had electric vehicles?

Agent 6, a sometime resident of Florida, e-mailed us to say that his residence on the Gulf side was not severely damaged by Hurricane Ian. A fence around the swimming pool was blown down, and some palm trees were damaged. After a hurricane (he writes) palm trees can look like someone took a torch to the leaves. The high wind actually burns the leaves turning them brown. I didn't know that.

6 sends along some food for thought, from an article by Thomas Lifson in American Thinker, 29/9/22. We trust they won't mind our reposting it, with verb tenses (only) changed as necessary.    

Large swaths of Florida’s heavily populated Gulf Coast were ordered evacuated. At least 300,000 people from the Tampa Bay area had to leave.

It is fortunate that as of the current moment, electric vehicles constitute only about 100,000, out of nearly 8 million vehicles registered to drive on Florida’s roads. What if they all were electric, the (impractical) dream dream of greenies?

Depending on how heavily loaded they were, even assuming everyone had a full battery charge, cars from southern Florida would start running out of juice after 100 – 250 miles. They would then have to spend hours at recharging stations, which would rapidly be clogged with other cars and trucks waiting their turn, since an electricity “fill up” can easily take an hour or more, as compared to a couple of minutes for gasoline. Cars waiting to be charged would spill onto the highways, potentially blocking traffic.

Those cars that ran out of juice on the highway would block traffic. Even assuming that emergency service vehicles could get to them (unlikely if the entire fleet were electric cars), towing a portable generator (powered by fossil fuels, of course) and recharging the stalled vehicles would take plenty of time, as well, further blocking traffic. The stranded cars would, of course, have no air conditioning, no wipers, no GPS.

In all likelihood, the highways would become vast parking lots, trapping their passengers wherever they happened to be stalled, waiting for the storm and flood waters to reach them, unable to get to safety.

It is a nightmare scenario, and it is perfectly predictable. California and other states have already mandated a conversion to an all-electric vehicle fleet. When natural disaster strikes and the fleet is electric vehicles, the disaster will be compounded if this mad scheme is carried through.

Footnote: Breitbart News reports that Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has warned looters that Florida is a 2nd Amendment state!