TOO LATE TO RUN
Irma’s winds reach Florida
MIAMI — After plowing a path of destruction through the Caribbean and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history, Irma began to clobber Southern Florida on Saturday and was poised to howl up its west coast today with deadly force and fury.
The time to gather supplies was over, and in most of the region, it was getting too late to run. The Florida Keys faced a potentially catastrophic brew of winds topping 125 mph and
a storm surge that threatened to drown whole islands.
In places such as Marathon in the Keys, those who had ignored orders to evacuate could only hunker down and hope for the best behind hurricane-impact windows, metal storm curtains or hastily constructed plywood barriers.
Farther north, as the forecast’s westward tilt put Naples, Fort Myers and the heavily populated peninsulas of Tampa Bay directly in Irma’s track, officials were frantically turning schools and other fortified buildings into shelters as fast as evacuees could wedge into them. Shelters opened. They filled. More opened. More filled.
“The storm is here,” Gov. Rick Scott said at a news conference Saturday, noting 25,000 people had lost power.
He said the storm surge could reach 15 feet in places. “Fifteen feet is devastating and will cover your house,” he said. “Do not think the storm is over when the wind slows down. The storm surge will rush in and it could kill you.”
Irma had already shown its might over the previous few days, reducing a string of Caribbean islands nearly to rubble. Now those same islands were girding for heavy winds brought by Hurricane Jose, upgraded to a Category 4, which was barreling past the Leeward Islands on Saturday.
Hurricane Irma had killed at least 25 people by the time it made landfall in Cuba Friday night as a Category 5, trampling directly through the island’s northern coast. The hurricane was downgraded to Category 3 as it moved away from Cuba on Saturday, but was expected to strengthen before its eye met land in Florida today.
With phone lines cut, there was little word yet of how coastal Cuba’s residents or tourist businesses — a significant economic driver — had fared. Residents in the central provinces of Camagüey and Ciego de Ávila awoke Saturday to see whole houses destroyed, roofs ripped off warehouses and downed trees scattered around like so many matchsticks.
Elsewhere, the power had gone out, while the coastal town of Caibarién was under several feet of water. The post-storm outlook was not encouraging: For one thing, most people in small coastal communities live in one-story buildings.
In Florida, unlike the Caribbean, many buildings are constructed to withstand powerful hurricanes. But if the projections for the storm hold, more than 3 million people on Florida’s west coast will confront storm surges that could inundate whole neighborhoods.
In recent days, the projected path of the storm bounced between Florida’s east and west coasts. By Saturday, however, the models were converging, pointing to the area between Naples and St. Petersburg.
For officials and residents up and down the Gulf Coast, it was time to make new plans.
In Collier County, which includes Naples, last-minute evacuation orders went out Friday and Saturday. All of Collier’s more than two dozen shelters had filled by Saturday afternoon, prompting officials to open two more, though they warned arrivals to bring their own supplies and leave pets behind. They were still searching for more shelters Saturday evening.
Space was so tight that in one flood-prone area, county officials told people living in twostory homes to stay put.
“We thought we were safe like 36 hours ago,” said a Naples Police Department official who declined to be identified because the official was not authorized to discuss the situation.
As the 260 shelters that opened across the state filled up, at least 70 new shelters were to open in Florida on Saturday. Scott asked for volunteers to help at special-needs shelters.
“All available nurses, if you’ll please respond,” he said at the news conference.
At Largo High School, one of more than a dozen shelters in Pinellas County, hundreds of evacuees colonized classrooms and auditoriums, assembling makeshift beds and sitting areas from whatever they could bring from home — air mattresses, blankets, light furniture.
Sherrie Webber, 64, and her husband, who live in nearby Pinellas Park, arrived at the school with a chaise longue to sleep on and the heart medication she has been taking since her open-heart surgery a year ago. It was her first time being forced to evacuate in 46 years of living there.
“My husband retires in May,” she said, frustrated by the timing. “We’re moving to Washington state. So I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen now.”
The storm is so vast, stretching more than 300 miles, and so powerful, with winds reaching 125 mph, that virtually no place in southern Florida could be considered completely out of danger.
Forecasters said hurricaneforce winds would begin hitting the Keys by daybreak. Waves were already breaking over the wall at the southernmost point in Key West.
“This is the big one, the hurricane we have all feared,” said Roman Gastesi, the county administrator for Monroe County, which encompasses the Keys. “Nobody should be gambling with their lives. If you can leave the Keys, you should go now. Don’t wait.”
Even the county’s emergency operations center was forced to flee its Marathon headquarters Saturday. Most of the staff went to the Ocean Reef resort in Key Largo, said the county spokeswoman, Cammy Clark.
Once the hurricane moves on, Keys residents who stay could find themselves cut off from the mainland — and from food, gas and other supplies — if any one of their 42 bridges is damaged. All Keys hospitals were closed.
At the Key West Bed and Breakfast, Jody Carlson and the six people on their way to ride out the storm with her could do little more than trust in the Bahamian shipbuilders who built her three-story wooden guesthouse at least 120 years ago. Up until Saturday morning, she had been convinced Key West would be spared.
Then she checked the latest advisory. “I started feeling a little queasy,” said Carlson, who has lived in Key West for more than 40 years and weathered past hurricanes — though none this strong. “Had I known it was going to change, and not head north, I would have left. But now there are no gas stations open. There are no hotel rooms, I’m sure. I have a dog and a cat. And my cat screams every time he’s with the dog.”
Some Floridians were given no choice but to clear out.
About 400 homeless people who live in a community of cabins and tents in a low-lying parcel of land near St. Petersburg, which has a sizable homeless population, had to clear out after a mandatory evacuation order.
In Miami, police invoked the Baker Act, a state law that allows authorities to institutionalize people if they pose a danger to themselves, to force the city’s homeless into shelters.
Meanwhile, the preparations drummed on. The mayors of Miami and the city of Miami Beach issued curfews starting Saturday evening. All along Interstate 75, the major northsouth artery on the Gulf Coast, workers had lowered the lighting fixtures that normally sit atop high steel poles, so they would offer less resistance to the wind and have a better chance of surviving.
Brig. Gen. Ralph Ribas Starke of the Florida National Guard said more than 7,000 troops were positioned around the state and would be ready to move once the winds died down to tropical storm levels.
Because the storm was so vast, the Coast Guard positioned its response force in New Orleans. It also declared “Condition Zulu” at the Tampa, St. Petersburg and Manatee ports, forcing the suspension of all activity indefinitely.
With the storm expected to move up the west coast of the state and then to Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, it was difficult to judge how long and how many people might be left on their own.
Officials said people in the direct path of the storm should have two weeks of supplies. But in the days before landfall, there was a run on basic goods, with shelves picked clean of water and many gas stations left with only fumes. By Saturday night, people had to make do with what they had.
The images of Irma’s rampage through the Caribbean, just after Hurricane Harvey swamped Texas, seemed to accelerate the anxiety.
Even as officials were trying to assess the wreckage on islands including Barbuda, Antigua and St. John, where the aftermath was so disorienting that people had resorted to a community Facebook page to find information on friends and family, they were forced to confront the fresh emergency of Hurricane Jose. Wielding winds of more than 130 mph, that storm passed by the region Saturday before heading north into open ocean. It was not expected to threaten the continental United States.
Jose was set to miss some of Irma’s hardest-hit targets, including Antigua and Barbuda, though authorities in Barbuda were evacuating its population of 1,600 to its sister island, Antigua. On St. Martin, Dutch Marines flying over the island in helicopters dropped fliers warning inhabitants to head to shelters.
In Florida, shelters were in high demand and a number of hotels closed on short notice, exacerbating the initial chaos of getting people where they needed to go.
There were more than 23,000 people in shelters in MiamiDade alone. For many, that meant spending several terrifying days in a strange place with strangers. Some shelters offered a small comfort: People could bring their pets.
As the storm approached, the halls of Highland Oaks Middle School echoed with the barking of dogs and the shouted instructions of harried officials. People lay on cots and blankets amid the stench of perspiration and vomit.
Everyone would rather have been somewhere else. The storm’s updated trajectory was all some needed to justify leaving.
“We’re going home,” Virginia Lopez, an administrative assistant at Barry University, said as she loaded her 5-year-old poodle mix, Princess, into her Mazda after spending the night there with her daughter and son-inlaw. “I don’t feel so scared.”
But most seemed resigned to waiting it out.
“There was not even a choice in the matter,” said Edwin Geliga, 35, who was ordered to evacuate his trailer park in North Miami Beach. “My trailer is a very weak structure. I know deep in my heart that it would collapse.”