Even Before Landfall, Floyd Drives Unprecedented Flood--of Evacuees

Well before it even crosses the Southeast coastline, Hurricane Floyd has already been crowned the King of Chaos, causing more anxiety and dislocation than any natural disaster in memory.

More than 2.6 million residents of five coastal states were under orders to leave their homes in what Vice President Al Gore called “the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the U.S.

“And all things considered,” Gore said at a news conference Wednesday, “it’s gone very smoothly.”

Maybe so.

James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other public officials lauded the level of cooperation with evacuation orders, issued in most cases by county officials. But the trajectory of the storm up the crowded East Coast and the scale of the exodus also revealed problems.

In particular, local officials were troubled that some highway evacuation routes became parking lots. Some motorists in northern Florida said they were stuck for 12 hours without being able to budge; a few even abandoned their plans and turned back home.

Even as the weakening but still dangerous storm heads for landfall along the Carolina coast early today, tens of thousands of evacuees in Florida and Georgia are returning to their homes to find that their inland run was unnecessary. Hurricane Floyd delivered only a glancing blow to Florida and Georgia, and damage was minimal.

The disparity between the number of people displaced and the actual damage caused thus far by the storm illustrates both the imprecision of predictive science and the respect most people have for a hurricane’s lethal power.

“Would people be happier if they came back and their house wasn’t there?” asked National Hurricane Center forecaster James L. Franklin. “I put up my shutters too. I’m satisfied that it wasn’t a wasted effort.”

Atlantic hurricanes often make a turn to the north and east as they approach the U.S. coastline. But predicting just when they will turn is what Frankling calls forecasters’ toughest call.

“It can easily occur 12 to 18 hours later than we expect,” he said. “But we have to issue warnings before the turn occurs. If we wait, and it occurs 12 hours later, people don’t have time to get out, and lot of people get killed.”

As Floyd grew nearer and larger, so too did the fretful reaction. Businesses and schools were closed, airports shut down, military operations scrambled, cruise ships rerouted, vacations spoiled. As Floyd spun larger and angrier in the satellite loops shown endlessly over television, the media focus intensified.

With winds clocked at up to 155 mph and the potential to create a 20-foot storm surge, the storm was a monster. Forecasters said Floyd could be catastrophic.

Suddenly, state and local officials began issuing evacuation orders, and tens of thousands of people from Miami to the Outer Banks hurriedly abandoned their homes, some only to find themselves ensnared in nightmarish traffic jams on overwhelmed highways or searching in vain for shelter.

“It was dark, we didn’t know where we were going, and it was very frustrating,” said Margaret Decker, 70, who left her barrier island home in Satellite Beach, Fla., Monday afternoon with her wheelchair-bound sister, Millie Brookhart, 72, and their two dogs, Sam and Peggy. They drove for four hours before finding what she called “a sleazy motel” in Winter Park, about 40 miles away.

Backups of 30 miles or more were reported out of Jacksonville on Tuesday. The Florida Highway Patrol described the only two interstates out of the city, I-95 and I-10, as “like parking lots.” On Wednesday, people began trickling back home while rains continued and Gov. Jeb Bush urged them to delay their return a bit longer.

In Orlando, about 50 miles from the coast, all 92,000 hotel rooms were occupied Tuesday night, a full-house phenomenon that usually only happens during the Christmas holiday season, according to Danielle Courtenay, an official of the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau. Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joe Riley estimated that 70% of the homes in his city had been evacuated.

Among those affected by mandatory evacuation orders were thousands of hospital patients, nursing home residents and mobile home dwellers miles from the sea.

“I cannot think of another evacuation on the scale of this one,” said FEMA’s Witt, “and as it moves up the coast there are going to be more persons displaced.”

The massive traffic backup on Interstate 26 out of Charleston late Tuesday drew an angry outburst from Mayor Riley, who lambasted South Carolina officials who delayed opening all lanes of the highway to westbound traffic until reports that some motorists had spent 17 hours stuck on the roadway going nowhere.

“It is unconscionable what happened, and I will not tolerate it again,” Riley declared. He said the decision to use both sides of I-26 for evacuees came too late, and only after he repeatedly urged officials to do so.

“My hand is still hurting from pounding on the tables,” he said, adding that he told state officials: “You’re running the risk of killing my people.”

To some, the stress of evacuation began to seem as overwhelming as the punch of Floyd itself. But it was precisely the deadly potential of the hurricane that persuaded an unprecedented number of people to flee.

Through its satellite image, the swirling, enormous red-and-purple storm seemed to be gobbling up the U.S. coastline. Every few minutes forecasters from the National Hurricane Center described Floyd as a looming disaster, one of the most massive, powerful storms on record.

Invoked were the legacies of storms past--the horrific toll of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, which killed more than 20 people and flattened acres of South Florida, and Hurricane Hugo, which smashed into South Carolina in 1989. As it churned toward the Bahamas and the southeast coast, Hurricane Floyd was stronger than both Andrew and Hugo.

So those in its path got out.

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., one parent was so concerned about the hurricane that she drove from Ohio to pick up her son, one of 1,800 students ordered to evacuate dormitories judged to be unsafe as shelters.

Most of the others found their own way to shelters. And they left willingly, gladly. “Students were pretty much in a panic,” said Jacki Donaldson, associate director of residence life. “They knew that the hurricane was a threat and Daytona Beach was a target.”

But traffic was hellish. “We had a lot of gridlock,” said U.S. Rep. Tillie K. Fowler of Jacksonville. “So we will be addressing that with our Department of Transportation people, both state and federal, to see, for the future, how we can plan some of these evacuation routes and their use.”

Still, many of those who spent hours in gridlocked traffic, slept in their cars or never did find a suitable shelter far from the shore hesitated to complain too much.

“The storm didn’t do us any damage whatsoever,” said Decker, who returned home after two nights away. “A few palm fronds down. But we were so grateful. “And we’d go again,” said the retired lab technician. “Because if you don’t don’t listen, and something happens, then who are you going to blame?”

Contributing to this report was Times researcher Anna M. Virtue.