Fearing the worst
Authorities warn 5.6 million people to leave as hurricane nears
Threat from Irma leads to massive evacuation in Florida.
MIAMI: Hurricane Irma’s relentless advance on Florida narrowed the window for residents to get to safety, with the latest forecasts shifting landfall southwest of the heavily populated Miami metro area.
The enormous storm regained Category Five status late on Friday as winds hit 260kph. Forecasters expect the storm to be near the Florida Keys this morning and approach the state’s southwest coast by the afternoon.
In one of the country’s largest evacuations, about 5.6 million people in Florida – more than one-quarter of the state’s population – were ordered to leave, and another 540,000 were ordered out on the Georgia coast. Authorities opened hundreds of shelters for people who did not leave. Hotels as far away as Atlanta filled up with evacuees.
“If you are planning to leave and do not leave tonight, you will have to ride out this extremely dangerous storm at your own risk,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said.
The governor urged everybody in the Keys, where forecasters expect the storm to hit first, to get out.
Ray Scarborough and girlfriend Leah Etmanczyk left their home in Big Pine Key and fled north with her parents and three big dogs to stay with relatives in Orlando.
Scarborough was 12 when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and remembers lying on the floor in a hallway as the storm nearly ripped the roof off his house.
“They said this one is going to be bigger than Andrew. When they told me that, that’s all I needed to hear,” said Scarborough, now a 37-year-old boat captain. “That one tore everything apart.”
Their house in the Keys, up on 1.8m stilts, has flooded before.
“This isn’t out first rodeo. Andrew was a wicked storm. Wilma was a wicked storm. This one is going to be worse. Then we’ll go home and rebuild, like we always do,” said Etmanczyk, a 29-year-old teacher.
Forecasters adjusted the storm’s potential track more toward the west coast of Florida, away from the Miami metropolitan area of six million people, meaning “a less costly, a less deadly storm”, University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy said.
Nevertheless, forecasters warned that its hurricane-force winds were so wide they could reach from coast to coast, testing the nation’s third-largest state, which has undergone rapid development and more stringent hurricane-proof building codes in the last decade or so. — AP