FLORIDIANS FLEE TO HAVEN IN HUB
Floridians fleeing Irma landed at Logan International Airport with what they could carry — including one man who brought his cherished baseball signed by Big Papi.
“We’ll probably have no house when we get back,” said Julio Bautista, a 42-year-old Boston expat who bought a home in Miami Beach only two years ago. “But before my father passed away earlier this year from cancer, he taught me material things you can replace; life, limbs and loved ones, you can’t.”
Bautista had bought a round-trip plane ticket for himself months ago for less than $300, with plans to attend last night’s New England Patriots game against the Kansas City Chiefs at Foxboro Stadium.
But as the projected path of Irma tilted toward Florida, he spent six hours trying to get his wife a ticket. He succeeded — for $1,107, one way, he said.
“In my opinion, it’s inhumane,” he said. “By charging four, five, six times the
normal price, the airlines are deciding who stays and who goes — and just maybe who lives and who dies.”
The couple traveled with their toddler son and Bautista also packed his David Ortiz-autographed baseball.
Like Bautista, Danny Lucier, 50, of Fort Lauderdale already had tickets for a flight to Boston and last night’s Patriots game before projections about the path of Irma began to grow dire.
The best he was able to do for his wife, Cindy, and his 17-year-old son, Cameron, were two $495 tickets — more than three times the price of his — for a flight arriving last night in Providence.
“Who knows what we’ll come home to; that’s the scary part,” said Lucier, who grew up in Foxboro. “But I knew enough to get the heck out of the way of this one.”
It was only on his flight over that he realized he’d forgotten to pack his own sports memorabilia, including balls signed by Red Sox legend Ted Williams and former Sox captain Jason Varitek.
Martha Sykes, 57, has one home in North Andover and three in Hollywood Beach, Fla., where people were ordered to evacuate by noon yesterday. But she, her boyfriend and his cat, Fellula, were at the airport there by 9:30 a.m., avoiding the parking lot that Interstate 95 North later became.
“We’re lucky; we’re here and we’re safe,” said Sykes, who wore a T-shirt on which she’d scrawled “Irma blows.” “Homes are homes, and life is life. What’s more important?”