In Savannah, the evacuation order’s appointed time of noon Monday came and went with no apparent rush to get out of town.
Many residents seemed to be staying in town, taking advantage of slow-moving Hurricane Dorian’s ever-changing path. But preparations were underway, just in case it does wallop the old coastal city.
Savannah officials had firefighters put protective shutters over the windows of City Hall in the downtown district, which, apart from the sight of the black shutters and the occasional closed shop, looked relatively normal Monday afternoon. People carried shopping bags as they walked from shop to shop. Old folks sat in the leafy park squares that speckle the city and held court as a friendly breeze swayed clumps of Spanish moss in the oaks towering overhead.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Sunday night ordered evacuations for residents east of the I-95 in six coastal counties. The affected area in Georgia stretches north from St. Marys in Camden County on the Florida border to Savannah in Chatham County on the South Carolina border. Evacuations were supposed to begin by noon Monday.
Dennis Jones, director of Chatham emergency services, said officials are considering whether to also evacuate areas of the county west of I-95. He said a decision on that will be announced Tuesday.
Officials at the emergency operations center for Chatham County plotted to help those who couldn’t help themselves get out of the evacuation zone. Buses started rolling toward a shelter in Augusta, where people struggling with disability and old age were boarding for free until the storm passed. On Tuesday morning, more buses head inland carrying other residents who for whatever reason had nowhere to go outside of Savannah or no way to get there, said Randall Matthew, the emergency preparedness manager in Chatham.
From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Chatham buses are offering free rides to the Savannah Civic Center, where chartered buses will take evacuees to inland shelters for free. Staying at the shelters is also free, as is the ride back to Savannah after the storm passes, Matthew told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The evacuation from the civic center is pet friendly.
But it’s too soon to tell exactly when officials will want evacuees to return because no one knows how badly Dorian will treat Georgia’s coast.
“Right now, we’re really threading the needle with this storm,” Matthew said. “It could go from, ‘Man, that was close,’ to something that is really awful.”
At least some residents seemed to take the evacuation order seriously, as evidenced by a several-mile backup up on I-16 on the outskirts of the city. But the backup soon cleared and loaded cars pressed west. Lovebugs, a staple of late summer in South Georgia, perished on their windshields, only to have their carcasses washed away by windshield blades swinging against the rain.
At the Lowe’s in Savannah’s neighboring city of Pooler, customers loaded up on plywood and gas tanks.
John Shivas, 66, who lives in the evacuation zone, swaddled a new generator in a blue tarp in the back of his pickup truck. He planned to stay home, unless Dorian’s projected track suddenly shifted inland. He said he stayed home during Hurricane Matthew.
“If you leave, you don’t know when you get back,” Shivas said. “They said last time the people who stayed were stupid, but the people who stayed helped clean the streets so the people who evacuated could get back on Monday. If everybody evacuated, you probably wouldn’t get back until Wednesday or Thursday.”
On Tybee Island, the popular tourist destination that’s seen regular flooding during storms in recent years, Dorian’s approach seemed to harm Labor Day fun. Many restaurants and shops were closed Monday afternoon and residents were thinking about evacuating.
Fred Mackey, 72, stood in the parking lot of the IGA grocery on U.S. 80, the main drag, and said most folks he knows plan to leave Tuesday. Assuming the forecast doesn’t suddenly start looking much better for Tybee, Mackey will probably be among those fleeing for higher ground.
“I don’t believe in standing in front of a train, and I don’t believe in standing in front of a hurricane either,” he said. “There’s plenty of places to run and hide around here.”
Mackey and some partners own Mackey House, an events venue in Savannah that does a lot of weddings. Mackey said he’s hoping damage from Dorian doesn’t cut into business. They have a wedding party of 250 planning to come use the facilities on Saturday.
“If it’s really trashed they gotta postpone, but hopefully, it looks like it’s gonna stay far enough off that we’ll just have a bunch of cleaning up to do,” he said.
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