It could still weave. It could still dodge.
Hurricane Irma could still bow to weather pressures greater even than the monstrous 185-mph punch she is packing and curve away from shore.
No matter. Three days and hundreds of miles before landfall, Irma is already wreaking havoc, clogging roadways and reviving gut-churning local memories of the big bad girls who preceded her: Frances, Jeanne, Wilma.
Gov. Rick Scott and Florida Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson Tuesday asked President Donald Trump to issue an emergency declaration for the state even before landfall. Tourists and residents alike are being evacuated from the Keys beginning today. So are swaths of Miami-Dade, the most populous county in Florida.
Effective midnight Tuesday, Palm Beach County declared a state of emergency.
Florida Power and Light, which serves half the state, issued its own preemptive caution Tuesday: Despite $3 billion spent to harden electric systems, the Juno-based utility warned Irma could still take down chunks of the grid, and possibly more than once.
HURRICANE IRMA: It’s lights out if Irma makes a direct hit, FPL says
Hotel rooms in southern Georgia were newly scarce, the result of an “extreme influx” in calls from Florida residents looking to escape the storm, said a Macon hotelier.
Palm Beach International Airport wasn’t crowded Tuesday. But that didn’t mean you could actually get a flight.
“The flight situation is like the water and the gas situation, you just can’t find any of it,” said Mary Hurley-Lane of Eileen’s Travel in West Palm Beach. Most flights out of Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami were booked by Tuesday, she said.
Credit Harvey, and a new number: Category 5.
Harvey might have been mostly rain, and Irma is expected to be mostly wind, but the images of stunned Houstonians still floating through their neighborhoods is hard to shake.
And Five? A Category 5 hurricane is like being hit with Cuban fireballer Aroldis Chapman’s 105 mph fastball — one and a half times. A Cat 5 is a tornado that spins over your roof for a few hours.
And Irma, a 185-mph Cat 5 the size of Texas, is what prompted thousands of Palm Beach County residents to weigh exactly the same question Tuesday: Do I stay or do I go?
“I’m a Floridian. I’m no stranger to hurricanes,” said Robert Norvell, the West Palm Beach man, who went through the eye of Hurricane David in 1979. But by the time David grazed Florida, it was a mere Cat 2, and Norvell was planning to drive his family to North Carolina later this week if Irma shows no signs of sparing Palm Beach County.
“This is different. There’s a different feeling to this,’’ said Norvell, a past president of the South End Neighborhood Association.
“It is a monster.”
HURRICANE IRMA: Gas prices spike 37 cents as refineries recover, Irma aims for Florida
Ryan Beckett, who owns a 1925-era home two blocks from the Intracoastal Waterway, has spent the past three days watching The Weather Channel. He and his father are talking about driving with their dogs to a friend’s house in Nashville. On Facebook, Beckett warned friends to consider leaving, too: “You can replace your assets but not your ass! Friends need to be smart and do not be the victim of hubris. This storm may still spare us but it is looking less likely as the hours pass. Better to be oversafe than sorry.’’
Joy Stincic of Boynton Beach got lucky. She snagged a hotel reservation in Orlando — because she booked on Saturday.
Only a week ago, Chic Kelty and his family drove 30 hours to return home to West Palm Beach from a vacation in New Mexico. Now he said the family will get back in the car on Thursday and drive to Charleston or New York City to flee Irma.
“The children are road-hardy and our little dog is a road warrior,” he said. “We’ll sit back and listen to books on tape and go to fairer shores.’’
But with the storm so far from shore, and with so many possible paths, there are few places to hide. Bill Johnson, Palm Beach County’s Emergency Operations Center director, pointed out that one of those paths has Irma traveling straight up the middle of the state.
“It’s good if people want to be proactive and get out of Dodge, but they need to go very far away from Dodge, they need to be in the Midwest if you want the honest truth, if they want to outrun a hurricane,” he said.
“The reality is the situation could change, and we should all be in preparation mode but we should not be reaction mode.”
At times Tuesday, preparation mode looked more like chaos than planning.
At one point on Northlake Boulevard, wingnut-hunting, water-searching, plywood-desperate drivers lining up for a shot to get into Home Depot, Costco and Lowes brought lunch-time eastbound traffic to a standstill. Lines formed to get into stores.
People lined their grocery carts up for water in a line that reached the back of a Publix in Boynton Beach’s Sunshine Square. Mayra Hernandez, a Winn-Dixie spokeswoman based in South Florida, said trucks full of water, canned goods, batteries and other hurricane supplies are making morning, afternoon and overnight deliveries to keep shelves stocked.
In Boca Raton, long lines of cars snaked into gas stations. Prices snaked up, too, topping $2.75 in certain areas, possibly fallout from Harvey, which shuttered refinery operations. At the Marathon station at Belvedere Road and Lake Avenue in West Palm Beach, gas could not be had for any price: The station sold out Tuesday afternoon.
At The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, “We have few guests now and they’re all departing well before the hurricane threat is here,” general manager Lloyd Van Horn said.
Countywide, in ways large and small, Irma rewrote the immediate future. In Palm Beach, fine-art shipper Gander & White scrambled to protect customers' valuables, shipping some, crating some, taking some to a local storage facility, shipping out the most valuable objects, putting them in a safer place on site, providing crates and packing materials or transporting them to Gander & White's storage facility in West Palm Beach.
The storm threat damped the Society of American Florists Convention that was booked for The Breakers; the convention canceled. Lake Worth announced the city pier would closed at noon Thursday and had no idea when it might reopen.
In Wellington, The Jeff Annas Memorial Firefighters 5k was canceled, with no plans to reschedule: It would have been the 10th and last run.
Dr. Marvin Kohn, the senior hand surgeon at the Orthopedic Center of Palm Beach County, was already cautioning about a recurring hurricane season problem: injuries from putting up shutters.
“They are not just up there changing a light bulb,” he said. But seniors do it anyway. “Here you are up on a high ladder and the wind comes and grabs the panel and they become a sailboat.”
Maureen Dunne of Hypoluxo wasn’t certain Tuesday whether she would be hunkering down at a buttoned down home or taking her chances on the road. She, her three daughters and their husbands had been texting since Friday about their options: perhaps flying to California or Connecticut to stay with family.
Or they could stay at home. Whatever the plan, she said, they will do it together.
“I’m not staying alone,’’ she said.
“There’s something about that crowd feeling that make you feel more comfortable than being isolated. Like, we’re in this together.’’
