Florida braces for the ‘Big One’ as hurricane Irma looms
They call it the Big One — a mythic, massive hurricane that would obliterate the densely populated southeast coast. And it has long been the stuff of Florida’s nightmares.
Irma, it appears, could be it. The storm has triggered near-panic in a region of more than 6 million people that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, clustered along a narrow ribbon of coastline that has seen nearly double-digit population growth over the past five years.
Isabella Janse Van Vuuren just arrived — she left her home in South Africa two weeks ago to start a job as a stewardess on a yacht, which she and other crew members spent time securing. As Irma approached, she was trying to decide whether to stay or go.
“I’m terrified,” she said. “I’m not used to this. I just want to go into a cave and hide, basically. This is not a nice feeling.”
But for veterans of life in the Sunshine State, hurricanes are as Floridian as oranges and Mickey Mouse. And every hurricane season brings with it the chance of cataclysm.
In 1928, a hurricane caused Lake Okeechobee to burst its banks, unleashing a 20-foot (6meter) wall of water that killed an estimated 2,500 people. The event was a key part of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
“All gods who receive homage are cruel,” she wrote. “All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion.”
Another famed storm, the killer 1935 Labor Day hurricane that swept across the Florida Keys, is central to the plot of the 1948 movie “Key Largo,” which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Irma could be the strongest hurricane to hit southern Florida since Andrew in August 1992, which caused widespread damage south of Miami. It killed 15 people and indirectly caused the deaths of 25 more in Miami-Dade County alone, according to the National Hurricane Center.
“It was very scary. We just had no idea how bad it was going to be,” said Rosi Ramirez, who went through Andrew as a child in Homestead.
She’s leaving Florida for South Carolina with her three children. “I don’t want my kids to go through that traumatic experience. I hadn’t thought about Andrew in a while. But now I am seeing some flashes of what we went through. It is all coming back.”
Floridians have not been directly hit by a major hurricane since Wilma in 2005, but if they needed any reminder of what might await them, they saw the catastrophic flooding and damage caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Jenna Wulf, a native Floridian who is six months pregnant, said seeing the damage caused by Harvey made her family more cautious; she stocked up on water Saturday and the hurricane shutters are going up on her home in suburban Plantation.
“I think it’s such devastation that you’d be silly not to go through the motions,” she said. “I’m nervous because I’m pregnant and because I have a baby already. I’m trying not to watch (the news) because I think it’s causing more panic.”
Andrew is often considered the worst storm in South Florida’s history. But in terms of fatalities, it didn’t come close to the “Great Miami Hurricane” of September, 1926, which killed 372 people when it came ashore directly over the city, carrying with it a 10-foot (3-meter) storm surge. Many died after apparently thinking the worst was over when the storm’s relatively calm eye passed over Miami, only to be caught without shelter in the second part of the hurricane, according to a National Weather Service history.