Army of road warriors flees Irma
Hundreds of thousands leave South Florida, braving jampacked roads and cars full of restless children.
It was 3:30 a.m. when the Orellano family of Lantana piled into its Prius and headed off into the darkness away from the menacing path of Hurricane Irma.
“We just wanted to get the heck out of town,” Shashanna Orellano said.
They were hardly alone. On major highways and on two-lane back roads, hundreds of thousands of motorists Thursday continued a mass exodus from South Florida, accepting the tension of traffic backups and cars full of screaming kids in exchange for safety from an approaching Category 5 storm.
“It’s kind of like gambling. I’d rather risk leaving and taking forever on the roads than staying and getting hurt,” said Angie Pineda Clarke of Lake Worth, who also left at 3:30 a.m. on
the Turks and Caicos before heading to the Bahamas and South Florida.
The offifficial forecast has it reaching the tip of the Florida peninsula Sunday morning as a high- end Category 4 storm with winds of about 155 mph.
Tropical storm-force winds will hit Palm Beach County on Saturday afternoon with hurricane force-winds beginning in the southern part of the county pre-dawn Sunday.
“St ruc t ural damage to sturdy buildings, numerous large trees snapped or uprooted, widespread power and communication outages,” is how Miami meteorologist Kevin Scharfenberg described Irma’s potential impacts. “We’d rather not focus on category because a Cate gor y 3 to 5 means real risk of life-threatening, destructive winds.”
Irma’s path takes the monster storm into a friendly e nv i ro nment o f warmer water and light wind shear.
It is being steered by the Bermuda High, charging al ong i ts underbelly and through the Caribbean. The upper-level trough that forecasters thought might grab Irma and take it to the east, either skimming Florida or heading more into the Atlantic, wasn’t even mentioned in the evening hurricane-center discussion.
Hurric ane -force winds extend out about 50 miles from Irma’s center with tropical storm-force winds reaching outward 185 miles.
Jeffff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground, said “50 miles will make the difference between tens of billions of dollars in damages or a few billion.”
“The trough is moving across the U.S. and we just don’t know exac tly what its position or strength will be on Saturday,” Masters said. “Small variations in the position and timing of that trough are crucial for where Irma goes.”
Hurricane and storm surge watches were issued for all of South Florida, with Palm Beach County emergency managers calling for mandatory evacuations of mobile homes, substandard housing and extreme coastal areas. A voluntary evacuation was c alled for Zone C, which includes areas between Intracoastal Waterway and farther west.
Storm surge heights could reach between 3 and 6 feet in areas from Juno Beach north.
The familiar mantra of emergency managers was often repeated Thursday: “Hide from wind, run from water.”
Between 1963 and 2012, 49 percent of deaths directly related to Atlantic hurricanes were because of storm surge, according to a 2014 study.
Wind was responsible for just 8 percent of deaths. About 3 percent of deaths were caused by tornadoes.
Jay Baker, an expert on hurricane evacuations and professor emeritus at Florida State University’s Department of Geography, said to treat powerful hurricanes like tornadoes.
“Get into the most interior room of the house and away from exterior walls,” he said.
Bryan Norcross, the meteorologist credited with saving lives during Hurricane Andrew, said in his book “My Hurricane Andrew Story,” that the smartest things he told people during the storm were to get under a mattress in their hall or closet and move to a safe area in their home when he moved into a “bunker” at the television station where he worked.
“People combined those two ideas in their own homes across South Dade and survived as, in some cases, concrete-block houses c ame down on top of them,” he wrote.