AT YOUR OWN RISK FLORIDA EVACUATES AS IRMA NEARS
Authorities set up shelters; hotels as far as atlanta are filled up
Hurricane Irma’s outer bands blew into South Florida on Saturday as residents scrambled to leave ahead of the massive storm that’s now aimed at the Tampa Bay area and the state’s Gulf Coast.
Forecasters expect Irma’s core to come ashore Sunday and strike the Keys, southwestern Florida and the Tampa Bay region, which hasn’t felt a major hurricane since 1921. The eye is expected to miss heavily-populated Miami, but that area will still get life-threatening hurricane conditions even without a direct hit, Hurricane Center spokesman Dennis
Irma weakened slightly to Category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 215kph on Saturday, but it was expected to pick up strength again as it closes in on Florida.
The National Weather Service said damaging winds were moving into areas including Key Biscayne and Coral Gables on Saturday morning, while gusts of up to 90 kph reported on Virginia Key off Miami.
In one of the country’s largest evacuations, about 5.6 million people in Florida — more than onequarter of the state’s population — were ordered to leave, and another 540,000 were ordered out on the Georgia coast. Authorities opened hundreds of shelters for people who did not leave. Hotels as far away as Atlanta filled up with evacuees.
“If you are planning to leave and do not leave tonight, you will have to ride out this extremely dangerous storm at your own risk,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said on Friday.
The governor urged everybody in the Keys, where forecasters expect the storm to hit first, to get out.
Ray Scarborough and girlfriend Leah Etmanczyk left their home in Big Pine Key and fled north with her parents and three big dogs to stay with relatives in Orlando. Scarborough was 12 when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and remembers lying on the floor in a hallway as the storm nearly ripped the roof off his house.
“They said this one is going to be bigger than Andrew. When they told me that, that’s all I needed to hear,” said Scarborough, now a 37-year-old boat captain. “That one tore everything apart.”
Their house in the Keys, up on 6-foot stilts, has flooded before.
“This isn’t our first rodeo. Andrew was a wicked storm. Wilma was a wicked storm. This one is going to be worse. Then we’ll go home and rebuild, like we always do,” said Etmanczyk, a 29-year-old teacher.
Forecasters adjusted the storm’s potential track more toward the west coast of Florida, away from the Miami metropolitan area of 6 million people, meaning “a less costly, a less deadly storm,” University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy said. Nevertheless, forecasters warned that its hurricane-force winds were so wide they could reach from coast to coast, testing the nation’s third-largest state, which has undergone rapid development and more stringent hurricane-proof building codes in the last decade or so.
In Florida, gas shortages and gridlock plagued the evacuations, turning normally simple trips into tests of will. Parts of interstates 75 and 95 north were bumper-tobumper, while very few cars drove in the southbound lanes.
In suburban Palm Beach County on the state’s Atlantic coast, the streets were nearly deserted early Saturday as the first squall from Irma dropped a brief shower over the area. Gas stations ran out of fuel, grocery stores were closed and only a few fast-food restaurants were open.
Sherry Whiteside, a Palm Beach Gardens mental health counselor, had come to her neighbourhood Publix because she was craving a cherry pie. Unfortunately, the grocery store was closed. Even with the forecast shifting west, she’s holding out hope for the entire state.
“I am praying that it will somehow disintegrate or — what’s that word? — dissipate,” she said.
Andrew razed Miami’s suburbs with winds topping 265kph, damaging or blowing apart over 125,000 homes. Almost all mobile homes in its path were obliterated. The damage totaled $26 billion in Florida’s most-populous areas. At least 40 people were killed in Florida.
A 57-year-old man who had been hired to install hurricane shutters died after falling about 15 feet from a ladder and hitting his head on a pool deck. —