Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
SLOW-MOVING TERROR
Day of questioning: It’s going to turn, right?
Jim Little is a gambling man. Grabbing a smoke in the Winner’s Way garage at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood just after noon on Monday, as heavy rain fell outside, Little talked like a winner.
“I could have canceled my reservation or jumped on a plane or a train last night. But it’s turning,” said Little, a pharmaceutical salesman from western Pennsylvania who once won $18,000 playing poker.
“I like the way the cards are falling for us,” he said, smiling.
The rest of South Florida seemed to be hedging its bets as the slow-moving terror of Hurricane Dorian menaced the Bahamas on Monday, teasing Broward and Palm Beach County residents with feints of a northerly turn that weather forecasters anticipated with growing conviction throughout the day.
Up and down the two counties, which spent days in the cone of concern for the possibility of direct landfall, residents were all in on Dorian taking a critical right jog. It was just a matter of time for The Turn. Right?
Right, says Jim Lushine, of Pembroke Pines, a
longtime meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Miami, now retired.
The fact that Dorian had virtually stopped its westward motion on Monday would allow for the northerly turn, guided by winds produced ahead of a lowpressure system dropping through the Southeast United States, he said.
“Somebody once told me a hurricane is like an elephant on roller skates. It doesn’t make a very sharp turn. It has to slow down tremendously before it can turn,” Lushine said.
But the change of direction would not put the Florida coast out of trouble, he warned.
As Dorian slows and weakens, it will get wider, said Lushine, who compared the potential effects of this storm with Hurricane Matthew, which made a beeline for a South Florida landfall in 2016 before going wide right. But during its offshore path up the edge of the state, Matthew strafed the Florida coast with a large, damaging wind field.
The level of trust placed in meteorologists and their prediction for The Turn is not misplaced, Lushine said. But he acknowledged, “there is bound to be skepticism.”
Lushine himself was among the experts who did not foresee Hurricane Andrew’s abrupt change of direction in 1992, when it took a last-minute turn from a course aimed at Fort Lauderdale and jogged southwest to Miami-Dade County. Lushine’s home in south Miami-Dade County was destroyed.
The science has improved in quantum leaps since Andrew, he said.
“The computer models weren’t as reliable as they are today. If the computer models had been around back then, [Andrew’s turn] might have been forecast,” Lushine said.
Schools were closed, roads were empty, surfing spots were busy and that favorite table at your neighborhood restaurant was probably available on an overcast Labor Day.
Most bars and restaurants had at least one screen tuned to The Weather Channel, where the news was promising in Broward and Palm Beach counties, as evolving cones and spaghetti models pushed the deadly eye of the 150 mph storm farther north, possibly avoiding a Florida landfall altogether.
But even good news was met by a complicated psychology. Video of the devastation in the Bahamas was difficult for many locals who frequently boat and stay in the islands. And with all due respect to Jim Cantore and his fellow Weather Channel evangelists, faith in The Turn was not without just-in-case skepticism.
On downtown Fort Lauderdale’s tourist-beckoning Las Olas Boulevard, caution prevailed. At Piazza Italia, a corner spot with two streetfacing walls of glass doors and windows, plywood and shutters were going up on Monday.
“It’s so close. We’re still not sure,” general manager Giuseppe Marino said.
Marino, of Hollywood, arrived in South Florida from Philadelphia in 2004 when Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne buzzed the region. He respects the unstable nature of hurricanes.
“A little jiggle, a little wiggle [in the trajectory of the storm] and things could get a bit hectic,” Marino said. “Let’s just be safe.”
Piazza Italia would be open for dinner on Monday, Marino said, and he would let overnight storm updates help him make a call on whether to open on Tuesday. Down the street, Ave Keller stood on a ladder in the rain trying to free a jammed panel of accordion shutters so he could cover the couture gowns in the front window of his upscale boutique Zola Keller. His forecast?
“To watch television, and leave it to the experts. It may be overkill doing this, but something’s going to happen,” Keller said.
There were no shutters up at Hurricane Grill & Wings in Coral Springs, where the TVs were tuned to sports and the Weather Channel. Owner Hanif Merali professed confidence in The Turn.
“I’ve been watching the weather for almost a week now and when it was pretty sure that it’ll make that upward turn, I decided that we had escaped this one,” he said.
Along Deerfield Beach, Stella Freedman described sitting through Hurricane
Andrew in Kendall, watching as roofs in her neighborhood peeled off like the skin of an orange. Freedman acknowledged that Dorian was similarly powerful, she but was confident in the forecast of the storm.
“They say it’s coming north,” she said. “If it came straight here, we would be in big trouble.”
Among some mobile homes in a low-lying area of West Palm Beach, Russell Johnson said he planned to ride out Dorian in his home, as he did for Hurricanes Michael and Irma.
Sipping a beer, Johnson admitted Dorian scared him but said he had a plan in place.
“I get drunk and go to sleep,” he said. “If I wake up dead, I wake up dead.”
Not far from Johnson’s mobile community was a group of about 10 people who lean on a combination of beer and running to blow off hurricane anxiety.
The group is known as the Hurricane Hash House Harriers and since Hurricane Andrew, they have gathered in the hours before hurricanes strike for a 5-mile run through declared evacuation zones. At checkpoints along the way, the runners stop to chug a few beers before continuing on.
On Monday afternoon the harriers were gathered in a vacant West Palm Beach strip mall parking lot where most of the stores were shuttered or closed for the day.
Harland Wurster founded the group in 1992 when he led a 5-mile run through an evacuated downtown West Palm Beach before Hurricane Andrew struck.
“This is a nice little reprieve before everything starts hitting,” Wurster said.
Willis Williams got to his food trailer at Riviera Beach Marina at 3 a.m. to prepare meat, banking that business will pick up if power outages begin. He had propane tanks and grills for his Willis’ BarBQ business. And he wasn’t watching the storm track.
“I ain’t worried,” said Williams, a lifelong Florida resident. “I never worry. I put everything in God’s hands.”
Near the barrier walls on Palm Beach, not far from Mar-a-Lago, Chad Lang and his family were among the crowd gawking at the waves. A pastor of a church in Lake Worth, Lang acknowledged “a lot of fear and anxiety” in his community.
But Lang himself was trying to stay optimistic. He compared the storm to a “typical Floridian” on the road with their turn signal on for miles and miles.
“It needs to turn and find its exit,” he said.