Evacuees Struggle Through Gridlock

When Liz Gallagher left her St. Augustine home to escape the oncoming fury of Hurricane Floyd, she had no idea where she would end up.

“We just said, `Go north and west,”’ she said on Wednesday from a Tallahassee-area shelter where she found refuge.

Millions of other coastal dwellers from South Florida to North Carolina’s Outer Banks had the same idea.

As a result, the largest evacuation in U.S. history, according to federal emergency managers, turned into the nation’s biggest traffic jam.

More than 3 million evacuees fled homes, condominiums and resort hotels, heading for the closest highways to move away from a raging storm the size of Texas.

Instead of a quick escape, however, many found gridlock.

In Florida alone, about 1.3 million residents were ordered out of the path of possible storm surges, high winds and drenching rain on Monday and Tuesday - almost nine times as many people as the D-Day invasion force that stormed ashore at Normandy on June 6, 1944. In reviewing how Florida handled the largest evacuation in its history - and the first of an entire coastline - Gov. Jeb Bush said he found only one major glitch: traffic flow.

“We normally have a lot of traffic in this state,” Bush said. “But we have serious infrastructure needs in general, and that plays out in a dramatic way during an emergency.”

But Bush said the evacuation order accomplished its purpose by getting people out of Floyd’s way with time to spare.

“We gave people enough advance notice and their lives were not in jeopardy,” he said. “That’s the most important thing. They evacuated.”

In Georgia, about 500,000 residents fled the state’s coastal regions on Tuesday, clogging highways leading north into the North Carolina mountains. In Georgia, eastbound lanes were converted to westbound to speed the exodus of cars.

By Wednesday, an estimated 850,000 South Carolina residents also were on the move, some spending up to 17 hours in traffic. Gov. Jim Hodges was criticized for waiting too long to turn Interstate 26 into a one-way highway inland.

Pat Wylie said it took his brother-in-law 10-3/4 hours to get from Charleston to Greenville - a trip that usually takes 3-3/4 hours.

“I don’t think the politicians had a clue,” he said. “They evacuated everybody, and they had no plan for the numbers.”

Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. was more blunt. “What you’re doing is running the risk of killing my people,” he said in an uncharacteristic attack on Hodges, a fellow Democrat.

At least 400,000 North Carolinians clogged roads around Wilmington, many ordered to leave the Outer Banks for the second time this month.

In Florida, residents fleeing the Jacksonville area found bumper-to-bumper traffic on all major escape routes on Tuesday, including Interstate 10, the only major east-west highway in North Florida. At one point, state officials asked Central Florida residents to help relieve some of the congestion by avoiding northbound Interstate 95 and using Florida’s Turnpike.

For some, the trip from Jacksonville Beach to Tallahassee, normally a three-hour drive, took as long as 12 hours.

Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney asked the Florida Highway Patrol to turn one of I-10’s eastbound lanes into a westbound route, but patrol officials said police agencies didn’t have the personnel to guarantee that drivers would be heading in the right direction.

By late Tuesday, however, the state rolled out tankers to help refuel westbound motorists who had run out of gas.

“When you undertake the largest evacuation in the state’s history, there will be lessons learned,” Bush said. He met Wednesday with evacuees who spent the night in a Tallahassee shelter.