Time runs out on massive evacuation effort
Officials spent the final hours ahead of Milton’s arrival imploring people to err on the side of caution.
TAMPA — As sheets of rain fell on Wednesday morning, dozens of people trickled into Middleton High School to take refuge, one of numerous shelters bracing for the impact of Hurricane Milton.
They came carrying clothes and water in plastic bags, huddled together under flimsy umbrellas, shuffling with canes. A family from Honduras arrived with five parakeets, two guinea pigs and a black rabbit, nervously juggling several cages.“We are all so worried,” Isabel Canales said.
Nerves were on edge across the city — and throughout much of central Florida — as the ferocious storm loomed offshore. As of 9 a.m., about 1,200 people had arrived at the school, and workers said room remained for anyone who still decided to seek shelter from Milton.
Soon, that would no longer be possible.
After days of one of the most massive, urgent evacuation efforts Florida has ever seen, time had all but run out for residents to make a choice: either flee from the powerful storm, or remain at home and brace for the fierce wind, rain and storm surge that lay ahead.
Even so, officials spent the final hours ahead of Milton’s arrival imploring people to err on the side of caution.
“What we’re looking at is a storm of the century,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said during a Wednesday morning briefing in Hillsborough County, reiterating that the populous coastal area home to several million people hasn’t experienced a storm of this ferocity in 100 years.
“There is going to be a point very soon where you won’t be able to get out,” said Castor, who urged people staying behind to get to higher ground and out of areas expected to be hit by devastating storm surge.
To the south, Sarasota County officials likewise begged people to get to safety ahead of Milton’s landfall. People living in mandatory evacuation zones, mobile or manufactured housing or on boats are especially at risk and needed to get out before condition’s worsened, said the county’s emergency management chief, Sandra Tapfumaneyi.
“We have the storm surge, we have the rain, we have winds that might be in the excess of 120 to 130 or more miles per hour, this is going to be an intense disaster for Sarasota County,” Tapfumaneyi said.
In Lee County, where storm surge is forecast to reach 8 to 12 feet, officials urged residents sheltering in place to remain indoors. As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,700 people were in county-run shelters, said Benjamin Abes with the county’s department of emergency operations.
State and federal officials joined in the last-minute pleas to residents.
“Nobody has to die from this storm,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters. “They just need to move out of the evacuation zone area into a place that is going to be safe from the storm surge,” she urged. “I believe there’s still time in some areas. But listen to your local officials. They’re going to tell you what you still have time to do.”
In recent days, mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for at least parts of 14 counties in the potential path of the storm — an area that encompasses millions of Floridians. Residents along the state’s Gulf Coast had fled in droves, often causing major traffic jams on highways and leading many gas stations to run out of fuel.
Hurricane Milton has forced more than 313 health-care facilities to evacuate, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said in a statement Tuesday night. Those include 17 hospitals, 63 nursing homes and 179 assisted-living facilities. The Florida Department of Health has deployed nearly 600 emergency response vehicles to assist these evacuations, the statement said.
Around Tampa, the rush has eased somewhat as Milton draws near.
Traffic along area interstates flowed briskly the past two days, with a steady stream of vehicles leaving the coast. Toll booths remain open so vehicles can drive through without stopping. Along Interstate 275, as on other major routes, signs read: “Tolls waived by order of the governor.”
Nearly a quarter of gas stations in Florida had run out of fuel by Wednesday afternoon. According to data from the gas price tracking service GasBuddy, about 24 percent of Florida’s 7,915 stations were without fuel as of 2:45 p.m.
In the Tampa Bay Area — near where the hurricane is expected to make landfall Wednesday night — 62 percent of stations no longer had gas. In Fort Myers, which also faces series threats from wind and storm surge, about 37 percent of stations are depleted — as are about 44 percent in Sarasota, according to the site.
Many trucks driving around could be seen carrying backup gas tanks. Several gas stations were selling just diesel fuel as only the gas had run out.
To Jennifer Collins, who studies human behavior around evacuations as a professor of geosciences at the University of South Florida, the congested highways are “a good sign” in a state where so many often overestimate how safe it is to ride out a storm at home. And the lack of gasoline at so many stations across the state, she added, is proof of how seriously people are taking the potentially historic hurricane,
“People are scared,” she said. “I just think we haven’t seen anything like this before, so people are very nervous.”
For those people, evacuation can offer a sense of control, even if they don’t know what will become of the homes they are leaving behind, she said.
Collins remembers evacuating ahead of Hurricane Irma in 2017, and breathing a sigh of relief as she drove away.
“It’s a good feeling to know that you’ve got your family out of harm’s way,” she said.
The gridlock on highways also was likely a product of the region’s dependence on cars, and for households owning multiple cars, the desire to protect them from floodwaters, said Craig Colten, a professor emeritus of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University.
In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, there was work to develop evacuation protocols that used buses, both to reduce congestion and to transport the many people who don’t own cars there, he said. But in a place like Florida’s Gulf Coast, lined with high-rise condominiums and populated by “snowbird” retirees, there can be many more vehicles on the road.
Of the hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the storm, many headed north into southeastern Georgia, where highways were clogged and most hotels were fully booked across a region still recovering from the damage of Helene two weeks ago.
In Savannah, sold-out hotels scrambled to fulfill reservation requests, as would-be guests stood in lobbies seeking the miracle of a last-minute cancellation.
“We’re just trying for anything, but we’re probably going to have drive into South Carolina at this point,” said Elizabeth Murphy, of Edgewater, Fla., as she stood waiting outside a local Marriott early Wednesday.
Her city, along Florida’s Space Coast south of Daytona Beach and east of Orlando, appeared to be squarely in the bull’s eye of Milton as it crosses the state. Murphy said her family felt it was not worth it to risk riding out what authorities have warned could be the most catastrophic storm to hit the state in a century.
“If you live in Florida, you are used to storms, but this one is very, very stressful,” she said, her voice beginning to crack with emotion. “You hope and pray for the best, but you worry what you’ll come back to.”
On I-95 northbound, which runs to the west of Savannah, traffic was 264 percent higher than normal near the Florida-Georgia line on Monday and 89 percent above normal early Tuesday, according to the Georgia Department of Transportation.
Back in Florida on Wednesday, DeSantis (R) reminded residents that ample shelter space remained for anyone in search of a safe harbor from the storm. He said that so far 31,000 people are staying in facilities with a 200,000-person capacity.
Robin Cocks, 60, was one of them. She followed a mandatory evacuation order in St. Petersburg and left her single-story home Wednesday for a shelter at a nearby high school.
“I trust the people who make those decisions,” she said of the orders.
Pinellas County officials had issued mandatory evacuation orders for about half of the county — 500,000 people, according to John Carkeet, a county spokesman based at the emergency operations center next to the sheriff’s office in St. Petersburg.
By late Wednesday, about 11,000 people had evacuated to the county’s dozen shelters, filling four, Carkeet said, a fraction of the total but still one of the largest evacuations in recent memory.
In Tampa, two Walmart employees — Eugenia Nava, 57, from Venezuela, and Fernanda Corrado, 34, from Honduras — arrived at a shelter Tuesday night and slept on the floor.
“This is my first storm. We’re Latin Americans, we’re not accustomed to this stuff,” Nava said.
“We have to leave this in the hands of God,” Corrado said.
Not everyone had fled or sought shelter, however. Many residents remained hunkered down in their homes — windows boarded, supplies of food and water secured — hoping for the best. Some posted on Facebook or Instagram, explaining their decision to stay put and wishing their friends and neighbors the best through the storm.
Lafayette McClendon, 40, had scrambled to find a U-Haul truck to fill with what remained of his storm-damaged belongings from Helene two weeks ago. But as of late Tuesday, he didn’t know where he might drive for safety. “We’re just going to keep everything in the truck,” said McClendon, as his kids helped him load things from their home in the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg. “Try to drive it to an evacuated zone and hope for the best.”
By early afternoon Wednesday, rain was streaming off an I-275 overpass in Tampa, and huddled beneath it was Gerardo Garcia, who had made up his mind about how to weather the ferocious storm barreling toward the coast: he was staying.
Police had been encouraging him and other homeless people to evacuate to emergency shelters in the city, but Garcia, 59, said he was more afraid of getting sick inside an enclosed space. The city of 400,000 had emptied out all around him — stores and businesses shuttered, gas stations closed, only a few scattered souls maneuvering under the darkening skies — but the former farmer and handyman from Cuba was unwavering.
“I’m good, I’m okay,” he said.
Nearby, authorities had begun to shut down major roads, closing escape arteries that had carried so many away to safer places in recent days.
The Sunshine Skyway bridge between Pinellas and Manatee counties. The Howard Frankland bridge connecting Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. The westbound lanes of the Gandy Bridge and the Courtney Campbell Causeway. All of them, closed until Milton came and went.
Around the same time, an emergency alert blasted popped up on cellphones around the Tampa area. It contained just a single line:
“Expect Milton impacts soon. Find shelter.”
María Luisa Paúl, Niha Masih, Emily Wax, Fenit Nirappil, Holly Bailey and Allyson Chiu contributed to this report.
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Person walks through surge waters after Hurricane Milton made landfall in Fort Myers, Florida © Getty Images / Joe Raedle