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Day 2 no power, the streets are dark, disaster tourism is at its peak.
What is disaster tourism?
Sorry to read it’s still dark out there, I hope you’re safe and sound.
Still around 500k (just in Hillsborough county) without power. Some stuff near me is coming back on, but entire neighborhoods are flooded, filled with downed trees and debris everywhere. Probably the worst hurricane to hit Tampa in a very long time.
A “major” hasn’t hit Tampa in over 100 years. (Major being 3 or higher.) Since landfall was Sarasota, I don’t know if this counts to break the streak, but it’s definitely the worst wind and rain in decades for Tampa and St. Pete. I’m very glad the storm surge didn’t also set records
What is disaster tourism?
“Disaster tourism is the practice of visiting locations at which an environmental disaster, either natural or human-made, has occurred. Although a variety of disasters are the subject of subsequent disaster tourism, the most common disaster tourist sites are areas surrounding volcanic eruptions.”
Other visitors have no connection to the site or the event, but happen to be there as tourists and visit those places as part of their sightseeing. A common example of this is tourists who come to Italy to sightsee in Rome and end up visiting Pompeii and its neighboring cities without initially intending to do so.
I feel like there’s a huge difference between visiting Pompeii and what I think of as disaster tourism. Even for more recent things like visiting Chernobyl, the site of the WTC (now), or Auschwitz aren’t the exploitative kinds of disaster tourism.
I kept reading and yeah:
the public perception of tourism depends on a wide variety of factors, such as whether the disaster was human-made or natural and how long it has been since the incident
