North Carolinians have been asked to ‘shelter in place’ before; this is not that.
Until this week, it had been a little more than six months since a government official in North Carolina had urged residents to “shelter in place.”
Gov. Roy Cooper’s message was to people who live along the state’s coastline as Hurricane Dorian approached in early September. The time for evacuations had passed, the governor said, and now people needed to hunker down and stay indoors until the wind and high water were gone.
“If your area is feeling the impacts of Dorian, please stay home and safe,” he said.
That’s what is usually meant by shelter in place. Shield yourself from something outside your door, whether it’s a storm, a man with a gun or a cloud of toxic chemicals.
The shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders being issued in places like Wake and Mecklenburg counties and the city of Durham this week have a different goal of reducing the spread of a communicable disease. In essence, they are to protect us from each other.
The scale and indefinite nature of the orders also makes them unusual.
“I don’t know of any precedent for this,” said Tom Birkland, a public policy professor at N.C. State University who studies how natural disasters are managed.
Birkland said curfews are common after natural disasters, sometimes out of misplaced fears of looting but largely to protect people from unsafe conditions. When a chemical depot exploded in Apex in 2006, some nearby residents were ordered to shelter in place until toxic clouds stopped billowing from the complex.
And companies and schools, including NCSU, have shelter-in-place plans for events such as tornadoes or a robbery at a nearby bank.
“We know where in the building to go,” Birkland said. “That only lasts for a few minutes.”
The shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders coming out this week are extensions of policies already in place to reduce crowds and enforce social distancing. And there remain numerous exceptions, including going to grocery stores and pharmacies and picking up take-out food from restaurants.
Birkland said history shows that most people abide by these kinds of orders during a crisis, as long as the directions are clear.
“Clear communication of what you’re asking people to do is important,” he said. “As long as that’s clear, as long as they tell us this is what you should be doing, then we’ll do it.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2020 at 2:13 PM.
