500,000 on coast told to evacuate; Governor calls state of emergency
By Maya Bell
Miami Bureau
September 2, 2004, 8:12 AM EDT
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UPDATE from The Associated Press: With homes still swaddled in blue tarp and the deaths from Hurricane Charley still fresh in their minds, Florida residents lined up before dawn Thursday for supplies or made evacuation plans as they braced for what could be the mightiest storm of the season.
Up to 750,000 people in Florida were ordered to leave their homes by Thursday afternoon as Hurricane Frances inched toward the U.S. mainland. States of emergency were declared in both Georgia and Florida.
Officials in Broward County, which contains Fort Lauderdale, ordered the evacuation Thursday of up to 250,000 people living on barrier islands, in mobile homes and in low-lying areas.
Packing 145-mph top sustained winds with higher gusts and a course that has emergency officials in several Southeastern states jittery, the Category 4 storm was expected to fluctuate in intensity as it headed for a Labor Day weekend rendezvous.
At 8 a.m. EDT, Frances' center was 470 miles east-southeast of West Palm Beach. It was moving west-northwest near 13 mph, and was expected to continue that course for the next day.
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With dread, disbelief and a sense of déjà vu, Floridians the length of the state prepared Wednesday to flee Hurricane Frances, just three weeks after Hurricane Charley caused billions of dollars in damage as it ripped across the peninsula.
Late Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane watch for about 280 miles of Florida coast from Florida City to Flagler Beach. A hurricane watch means that those areas could start feeling hurricane conditions within 36 hours.
Earlier in the day, Gov. Jeb Bush had declared a state of emergency throughout Florida, his second in 22 days. No other state in the past century has faced two such powerful storms so close together, hurricane experts said.
About twice the width of Charley, Hurricane Frances could strengthen into a Category 5 with winds of 156 mph or higher, forecasters said.
"I can't emphasize enough how powerful this is," National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield said. "If there's something out there that's going to weaken it, we haven't seen it."
Nearly a half-million people were told to get ready to evacuate as Frances headed toward a projected landfall Saturday. Palm Beach County ordered a mandatory evacuation of 300,000 residents along coastal areas beginning at 2 p.m. today, and Brevard County also told 185,000 residents in mobile homes and barrier islands to prepare to leave this afternoon.
Shelters for Brevard residents with special needs will open at 10 a.m. today. Melbourne Greyhound Park has been designated for pets. Other coastal counties were making similar evacuation plans.
Brevard and Volusia schools planned to close today and Friday. Osceola and Orange public schools will close Friday.
The governor ordered the National Guard to report today and be up to strength by Friday. All state toll roads suspended taking tolls Wednesday. Craig Fugate, director of the state Division of Emergency Management, said steps were being taken to prepare for large-scale evacuations, including possibly reversing lanes of some highways to accommodate fleeing coastal residents.
Late Wednesday, the official three-day forecast, which has an average error of 250 miles, had Frances coming ashore on Florida's central east coast Saturday evening. Forecasters cautioned Floridians not to concentrate on the forecast track, but rather on the entire projected track, known as "the cone of error."
That cone showed the entire peninsula in Frances' potential strike zone.
"Hurricanes are not points, especially in Frances' case, because it's so large," hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart said. "We don't want people to say, 'Thank goodness, I live in Daytona Beach. It's coming in Melbourne, so I'm OK.' They're not OK. By no means are people out of the woods anywhere in Florida."
In Brevard, coastal residents braced for the possibility that Frances might strike somewhere along the county's 72-mile coastline.
At Kennedy Space Center, which will close today and Friday, workers put sandbags around NASA facilities, sheltered equipment and took precautions with the three space shuttles that will ride out the storm inside their hangar.
To protect property from looters, a dusk-to-dawn curfew will be in effect in the evacuation areas beginning at sunset Friday. Alcohol sales also will be suspended in those areas.
"We've had so many problems in past storms with people having hurricane parties," said Joan Heller, spokeswoman for Brevard County's Emergency Operations Center. "Frankly, we have much bigger fish to fry than dealing with a lot of drunks."
At Titusville City Marina, Paul and Andrea Landry packed a few important papers and personal photographs and prepared to leave their 42-foot sailboat, Ta Ta, to fate. They booked hotel rooms in Ocala and begged invitations from friends in Fort Myers and South Florida, depending on which way the winds blow.
Cruising the Caribbean for 13 years has made them philosophical about material things.
"It's just stuff," said Andrea Landry, 55. "You can replace stuff."
Rooms from Tallahassee throughout North Florida and southern Georgia were booked solid on the eve of what could be the largest mass movement of Florida residents and tourists in history.
After nailing plywood to the windows of her Flagler Beach home, Mary Stevens tried to find a hotel room for herself and her husband, Bill. All the hotels, all the way to Georgia, were booked.
"Tomorrow night, we're going to get in the car and just start driving north until we find a vacant hotel," said Mary Stevens, 50, an insurance-claims adjuster.
Before Charley, emergency officials feared Floridians had developed "hurricane amnesia" since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
This time, complacency is not the problem. Instead, hurricane forecasters worry that tens of thousands of Florida's east-coast residents will drive long distances to escape the uncertain path of Frances and clog the roads. When told to evacuate, those in low-lying areas, mobile homes and oceanfront homes should head for higher ground as near as possible.
"We don't want people evacuating hundreds of miles. Go tens of miles. Move inland. Don't drive up or down the state," Mayfield said.
In Vero Beach, roads were quickly becoming clogged with fleeing residents and tourists, convincing Julie McCusker to stick out the storm with her husband and seven cats inside her husband's concrete-block office building near Interstate 95.
"It's more dangerous right now to evacuate than to stay put," she said.
The scope of the threat was unprecedented. Records from the past century show no two Category 4 storms with winds of 131 to 155 mph hitting a state within weeks of each other, hurricane-center meteorologist Rick Knabb said. Charley came ashore with top sustained winds of 145 mph.
The last time two major hurricanes hit Florida in rapid succession was in 1950. Hurricane Easy hit Tampa about Sept. 4 of that year, and Hurricane King hit Miami six weeks later on Oct. 17.
To prepare for Frances, state and federal officials are urging counties and residents to take care of the unfinished business left behind by Charley: debris removal. If the browning piles of branches, dissected tree trunks and building rubble can't be removed in time, officials are asking people to store as much as possible inside.
In Orange County, about 60 percent of Hurricane Charley's debris is still on the ground. Another concern is the availability of generators for its sewage lift stations. Many of those generators have been shipped back, but the county is in the process of recovering them, Orange County Chairman Rich Crotty said.
"You know, a few weeks ago, I said that Charley was not a drill. But I may have been wrong. Charley may be a drill for Frances," said Crotty, who returned Wednesday from the Republican National Convention to prepare for Frances.
Residents throughout the state made runs on hardware stores and grocery shelves, sometimes fighting about sheets of plywood and gas-powered generators.
Ace Hardware in Orange City sold 2605-gallon gas cans in nine minutes. At the Home Depot in Orange City, an afternoon shipment of 700 sheets of plywood was gone in less than an hour, with a limit of 10 sheets per person.
In Melbourne, Mark Zider, a 40-year-old retired roofer from Seattle, was boarding up Wildcat Tackle & Bait shop and preparing to head for West Virginia in his mobile home to wait our the storm.
Zider bought the bait shop just four months ago.
"I've enjoyed owning it," Zider said, "but if that hurricane hits and it's gone when I get back, I guess I picked the wrong year to buy, and they picked the right year to sell."
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Thread: Hurricane Frances Updates & News
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