Hurricane
Florida residents flee from Irma
NAPLES, Fla. — Hurricane Irma’s leading edge bent palm trees and spit rain as the storm swirled toward Florida with 120 mph winds Saturday on a projected new track that could expose Tampa — not Miami — to a direct hit.
Tampa has not taken a head-on blow from a major hurricane in nearly a century.
An estimated 70,000 Floridians huddled in shelters as Irma closed in on the Florida Keys, where it was expected to roll ashore Sunday morning and begin making its way up the state’s west coast.
“This is your last chance to make a good decision,” Gov. Rick Scott warned residents in Florida’s evacuation zones, which encompassed a staggering 6.4 million people, or more than 1 in 4 people in the state.
Earlier in the day, Irma executed a westward swing toward Florida’s Gulf coast that appeared to spare the Miami metropolitan area of the catastrophic direct hit that forecasters had been warning of for days.
Still, Miami was not out of danger. Because the storm is 350 to 400 miles wide, forecasters said the metro area of 6 million people could still get lifethreatening hurricane winds and storm surge of 4 to 6 feet.
Irma — at one time the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic — left more than 20 people dead across the Caribbean as it steamed toward the U.S.
It was chugging toward Florida as a Category 3, with winds down considerably from their peak of 185 mph (300 kph) earlier in the week. But it was expected to strengthen again before hitting the Sunshine State.
Meteorologists predicted Irma would plow into the Tampa Bay area by Monday morning. Tampa has not been struck by a major hurricane since 1921, when its population was about 10,000, National Hurricane Center spokesman Dennis Feltgen said. Now the area has around 3 million people.
The new course threatens everything from Tampa Bay’s bustling twin cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg to Naples’ mansion- and yacht-lined canals, Sun City Center’s retirement homes, and Sanibel Island’s
shell-filled beaches.
The course change caught many people off guard and triggered a major round of evacuations in the Tampa area. Many businesses had yet to put plywood or hurricane shutters on their windows, and some locals grumbled about the forecast.
“For five days, we were told it was going to be on the east coast, and then 24 hours before it hits, we’re now told it’s coming up the west coast,” said Jeff Beerbohm, a 52-year-old entrepreneur in St. Petersburg. “As usual, the weatherman, I don’t know why they’re paid.”
Nearly the entire Florida coastline remained under hurricane watches and warnings, and leery residents watched a projected track that could still shift to spare, or savage, parts of the state.