Floyd Spawned A Moving Experience Storm To Be Remembered For Forcing Massive Exodus
Hurricane Floyd may be remembered for this bench mark if nothing else: the historic number of people it sent packing.
As it plowed up the southeast coast, 1.3 million Floridians were ordered to leave, followed shortly by 500,000 Georgia residents, all 800,000 residents of the South Carolina coast, and 500,000 in North Carolina. Still others living in its path farther north were bound to follow suit.
The shoreline emptied. And nearly everyone except police officers, jail inmates and the sickest of hospital patients seemed to be on the road to Anywhere to Get Away from Floyd. They were anxious and reluctant participants in what federal officials have termed the largest mass evacuation in the nation’s history.
Overall, the exodus drew praise from emergency officials, who said it acted almost as a test of how smoothly the detailed evacuation plans devised by various state and local governments could work, and how swiftly residents could marshal themselves when faced with a monstrous natural phenomenon. They said it was too soon to calculate economic losses from shuttered factories, canceled airline flights and deserted tourist attractions.
Travelers grumbled about their interminable journeys, however, complaining it took 14 hours, in some cases, to reach havens that were normally a four-hour drive away. Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley publicly criticized South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges for delays Tuesday in opening all lanes of jammed Interstate 26 to westbound traffic as frustrated evacuees crept away to safety.
Hodges’ press secretary, Nina Brook, said the frustration is understandable, and that the lanes-reversal and other streamlining measures will be quicker next time. In a Thursday teleconference with emergency officials and other governors, Hodges discussed how the interstate system was overburdened as evacuees from Florida and Georgia streamed north in search of safer ground and what could be done to relieve the problem.
All lanes on Interstate 26 lanes were shifted eastbound Thursday as officials turned to the next task: getting everyone back home. “Traffic is slow,” Brook said, “but at least it’s moving.”
“Overall, we’ve never moved so many people so far with so few problems,” said David Bruns, a spokesman for the Florida Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. “It was astonishing it went as well as it did, but of course, you probably didn’t feel that way if you were sitting in a car for hours.”
The approaching storm - and all the attendant publicity about its size and onetime might - apparently spurred even some of the most diehard anti-evacuees to run.
The results were awesome as caravans of families with small children and unhappy pets inched along jammed interstates; motels filled up so quickly that rumors spread that the nearest empty rooms were in Tennessee; and impromptu shelters at churches and volunteer fire departments welcomed overnight guests.
The American Red Cross housed 101,512 people Wednesday night in its 456 shelters located in six states, one of its largest crowds ever, said spokesman Darren Irby. Five shelters had to be opened in unaffected Alabama and several others in Tennessee to handle overflow crowds, he said.
At a Thursday news conference at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he announced the released of another $528 million to aid hurricane victims, President Clinton praised the emergency effort and said no one should doubt the reasoning behind the evacuations or fail to comply with future orders to seek shelter.
“I’m sure there will be those who second-guess this now, because Florida was not hit and we moved a lot of people out,” Clinton said. “The storm wasn’t as bad as we thought. But we now have the technology that imposes on us the responsibility of telling people what we think is going to happen, and there is no question that because we can do this now, thousands and thousands of lives will be saved.”