Lake Okeechobee communities resist evacuation orders

BELLE GLADE, Fla.—Many people in the small, impoverished communities south of Lake Okeechobee said they wouldn’t evacuate Friday, saying they either had no transportation and nowhere to go, or they chose to accept whatever fate Hurricane Irma would inflict upon them.

The lake’s 80-year-old dike isn’t in danger of a breach, but Irma’s winds may drive lake-waters over a few of its weak points, aggravating flooding caused by rainfall or storm surge, Army Corps of Engineers officials said.

Florida officials ordered mandatory evacuations in seven small cities in the “Muck City” area.

In Belle Glade, homes and stores were boarded up, but their owners had decided to stay.

Jose Alvarado and Orlando Rodriguez cut plywood to cover a gas station’s windows.

Rodriguez said he expected Belle Glade to suffer some storm damage. “But some people don’t want to leave their home and everything they have. They’ve lived here all their lives,” he added.

Shameem Khan, the station’s owner, said he survived the 1970 Bhola cyclone that killed up to 500,000 people in Bangladesh.

“I grew up with these things,” said Khan, who immigrated to the U.S. 35 years ago. “A lot of people there, they don’t take the government forecast seriously and there are a lot of places that are hard to reach.”

Irma was expected to drop up to 15 inches of rain over the lake, and Category 4 winds of at least 130 mph could blow across its waters for up to seven hours, said Col. Jason Kirk, the Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville district commander. The winds could send water splashing or streaming over three culvert construction sites, Kirk said.

Lake levels Friday were 13.7 feet deep, below levels that cause water to seep through the earthen dike and raise the breach risk.

Flooding from the 1926 Miami hurricane, a Category 4 storm, killed about 300 people in Lake Okeechobee communities. Two years later, Belle Glade was wiped out by a hurricane that made landfall with 145 mph winds and crossed over the lake.

The dike failed, unleashing a 20-foot wall of water that drowned an estimated 2,500 people in communities of poor, black farmworkers. The disaster was a key part of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”