South Florida’s beaches were eerily bare Friday as residents swarmed hardware stores and waited on lines at gas stations as they prepared to flee Hurricane Irma’s wrath.
Gov. Rick Scott urged residents in evacuation zones, including more than a half-million people in Miami-Dade County, to leave their homes as the Category 4 storm with its 155-mph winds lurched closer. In total, about 1.4 million people across Florida and Georgia, which is also in the cross hairs, were ordered to evacuate.
Scott said preserving lives remains a priority after Irma pummeled several small islands in the northern Caribbean, smashing homes and killing at least 12 people.
“We are running out of time. The storm is almost here,” Scott said at a news conference earlier Friday. “If you are in an evacuation zone, you need to go now. This is a catastrophic storm that our state has never seen.”
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Florida Power & Light, the nation’s third-largest electric utility, warned it was expecting “unprecedented” power outages.
“Based on the current path, the current intensity, we are looking at outages that are probably going to impact 4.1 million of our customers. That’s about 9 million people. That would be unprecedented for us,” FPL CEO Eric Silagy told reporters Friday.
The utility has already pre-positioned equipment and workers to help bring electricity back up and running as fast as possible, but is expecting concrete poles to snap under the force of Irma’s winds, Silagy said.
“We’re preparing for the worst. With these kinds of winds, we’re not looking for restoration,” he said. “In some parts of our territory, we will be looking at having to rebuild it.”
The dire warnings come as forecasters said Irma still remains potent after weakening slightly from a Category 5. The National Hurricane Center said the storm could bring life-threatening surges of up to 10 to 12 feet in southwestern Florida, including the Florida Keys, and rainfall between 4 to 8 inches or more.
Irma was about 380 miles southeast of Miami and brushing the Bahamas and Cuba as of 2 p.m. ET, with a potential landfall occurring in the Florida peninsula more likely Sunday morning.
Emergency officials advised people not to travel far in order to evacuate, but locate shelters that are safely away from storm surges. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he hoped to have 43 shelters open in the county by the end of Friday with a capacity for 100,000 people. But he warned more than 660,000 people will need to seek hurricane-proof shelter.
One shelter in southwest Miami-Dade was already at its maximum capacity of 2,400 people just a few hours after opening, reported NBC Miami.
“This is an unprecedented event. We are now rewriting a book,” Gimenez said on MSNBC.
As evacuations continued to create gridlock on highways, getting out is requiring creative methods. Some are taking any available flight, even to random destinations. Others are combining buses, carpools, and hitching rides with strangers.
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Tony Marcellus was struggling to figure out how to get his elderly mother and grandfather from their home near the ocean in West Palm Beach to his place in Atlanta, 600 miles away. Flights and rental cars were sold out, so he hired an Uber driver to take them 170 miles to meet him in Orlando.
Manny Zuniga left his home in Miami at midnight Thursday and it still took him and his family 12 hours to get 230 miles to Orlando — a trip that normally takes four hours.
“We’re getting out of this state,” he said, filling up the gas tank of his tightly-packed SUV in Orlando. His final destination is a relative in Arkansas.
“Irma is going to take all of Florida,” he added.
American Airlines said it was winding down operations Friday afternoon in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers and West Palm Beach, and was canceling all operations through the weekend. It was also planning to begin shutting down its Orlando flights by Saturday afternoon.
Georgia was also preparing for the hurricane effects of Irma. Gov. Nathan Deal announced mandatory evacuations to go into effect Saturday at 8 a.m. ET for certain low-lying parts in the state’s south.
Even as forecasts showed the storm’s center could enter Georgia far inland, Deal urged nearly 540,000 coastal residents to flee, noting Irma’s path remains unpredictable. Forecasts show it could enter the state Monday anywhere from the Atlantic coast to the Alabama state line.