No let up from Irma
Prepared for the worst, Floridians ride it out
Hurricane continues to churn its way up the Florida coast; flooding ‘catastrophic.’
ESTERO, Fla. — The forecasters had fiddled with the storm track for days, nudging it to the east and then pulling it back to the west, but when Hurricane Irma finally blew in Sunday, it reminded everyone that when a tropical cyclone reaches a certain size, it simply can't miss.
This storm was nearly as big as the state of Florida, which is why everything but the Panhandle was under a hurricane warning. Irma's broad wind field also meant that when the winds picked up, they stayed up as the storm howled northward.
Even cities far outside the eye of the storm found themselves caught in an atmospheric blender that had no off switch. Patience suddenly became as important as a sturdy roof and reliable drainage.
"Anyone think we overreacted with the evacuation order?" Michael Hernández, spokesman for Miami-Dade County, asked late Sunday morning at the county Emergency Operations Center.
As he spoke, one TV monitor showed a huge, collapsed construction crane downtown, draped on a building as though it had melted in the rain, and another showed a wide river of floodwater racing down Brickell Avenue, Miami's financial district and once the neighborhood of pop star Madonna.
The storm's westward shift was good news for South Florida's Gold Coast but very bad news for Key West, as well as Naples, Fort Myers, Port Charlotte, Sarasota, St. Petersburg and Tampa — table-flat waterfront communities that have boomed in recent decades with millions of new residents but haven't gained more high ground.
In Estero, Dianne and Riley Abshire, who moved to Florida six years ago from Ottawa, Ohio, waited for Irma in a home darkened by hurricane shutters. Winds at the time gusted to 45 miles per hour. Hibiscus trees bent to the ground. Tornado watches and warnings flashed across their television screens. They chose to stay in their home because they worried about traffic getting out of the state and because Riley Abshire is recovering from surgery.
"I feel like I'm in a sardine can, and I don't like it," said Dianne Abshire, 62. "My husband said he'll duct-tape me to a chair if I try to open the front door."
In Bonita Springs — between Naples and Fort Myers — on Sunday morning, streets that were empty but for a few emergency vehicles started filling with runoff that was not running off. Officials announced they would pull everyone off the roads at 11 a.m.
A Waffle House on Bonita Beach Road had posted a sign promising, improbably, that it would reopen soon.
More than 30,000 people flocked to Collier County's shelters, including about 4,000 in the massive Germain Arena, which was still accepting people at 10 a.m. But a wild rumor spread on social media that the arena was unsafe, and that set off "mass hysteria," according to a Lee County spokesman. Tim Engstrom, communications specialist, said officials were trying to reassure residents that the venue was hardened against hurricanes. "We don't have much information, but this is absolutely false," Engstrom said as the hurricane approached steadily.
In Pasco County, north of Tampa, sheriff's officers warned citizens not to shoot guns into the air after a Facebook page that suggested shooting Irma out of the sky went viral.
"The bullet trajectory could come down and hurt individuals," said Pasco County Sheriff's spokesman Doug Tobin, noting that there were no reports of anyone actually trying to shoot the hurricane.
The lower half of the nation's third-mostpopulous state went into lockdown as residents rode out the big blow and wondered when it would end. The storm took its time rolling in from the Caribbean. When it arrived, there was no mistaking what this was — not an ordinary line of storms but a trueblue hurricane, the powerful winds interrupted by even more powerful gusts and rain coming down in blinding quantities.
Everyone watched the slow-moving, ominous green blob that represented Irma on more than a dozen computer screens at the National Hurricane Center overnight Saturday. A handful of journalists, federal government workers, hurricane specialists: Everyone monitored the radar maps of the monstrous storm's snail-paced path as it prepared to batter Florida.
Figuring out what the outskirts of the storm were doing right outside the building in Miami, however, was harder to determine.
"You hear the rain on the roof?" a videographer inside asked on Friday evening.
"I think that's the AC," someone responded.
"No, it's the rain," he said, this time pointing to the ceiling so everyone would listen more carefully.