Kempner: How a hurricane blew money across the South

I wasn’t an evacuee fleeing Hurricane Matthew, the storm that tried to drown the Southeast coast from the ankle of Florida to the toes of Virginia.

While reports were still coming in about the immense heartache in Haiti, and while coastal families worried about their safety and the survival of homes and businesses, I was dumbly heading for a weekend at the beach hundreds of miles from any hint of trouble.

The Florida Gulf Coast near Destin promised brilliant sunshine, not a drop of rain and just the faintest of breezes. I knew from weather reports that the hurricane wouldn’t come anywhere close. I was sort of wrong.

Matthew shoved people all over the Southeast, like it was pushing a tidal surge. All the way to Alabama, a state away from the real action. And into the Alpine-themed shops of Helen in the foothills of north Georgia where I met a family of Hilton Head evacuees still on the road.

For some Southern businesses, I’m sure, it was literally a financial windfall.

Only a vague plan

Friday night after meeting friends for dinner in Atlanta, my wife and I headed for an only vaguely-planned trip to the Destin area to meet family visiting there. We had a hotel booked for Saturday night, which, for us, was unusual advance work.

We figured we’d find a hotel for Friday night. Just past Columbus, Ga., I searching online for inexpensive hotels, jumping around among Priceline, Trivago and Hotels.com.

I knew almost instantly we were in trouble.

Lovely, slow-moving Eufaula, 250 miles from the Georgia coast? Booked solid.

The next sizable town farther south? Dothan was done.

Panama City, Panama City Beach and Destin, a three-hour drive away? Funny.

We found one slot left at what looked like a roach motel that was gone before we could act. I spotted a single room in PCB for $699. Not on my salary.

We would have been happy to backtrack to Columbus, but we checked. There was no room at the inn.

So, we pulled in at a little hotel in Eufaula to do some reconnaissance. Were they squirreling away a room? The clerk wasn’t even inside. She was under the drive-up in a pickup with the truck’s door open. She knew what I was doing, and I knew what she was doing. I was a searcher; she was the one assigned to say “Sorry” and keep the evacuee traffic moving on.

She told me every room in town was spoken for by 5 a.m. that day. As far as she knew, everything was booked to the north, too.

Sites available

As it turns out, there’s a state park in Eufaula. The lodge was stuffed, but there were plenty of camping sites available. Guess what my wife and I happened to have thrown in our SUV? Yup, a snug little tent.

I hadn’t anticipated the flow of evacuees to smaller towns so far from the hurricane coast.

The Callaway Gardens resort nearly sold out its lodging in Pine Mountain in west Georgia. Some of the hundreds of evacuees were still there on Wednesday, spokeswoman Rachel Crumbley told me.

I imagine Matthew was a perfect storm when it came to evacuation impact.

It cut across a wide swath that pushed lots of people out of their homes. It drilled into a long-Columbus Day weekend, scaring tourists away from spots like Disney and Myrtle Beach and steering them elsewhere, maybe to places like Destin. The impact lingered, as some people who evacuated spent days cut off from homes, even those with minor damage.

Which is how, a few days later on a work daytrip, I met Nancy and Chris Paris and their kids 11-year-old Sophia and 9-year-old Colin in Helen, the north Georgia town that’s perennially in Oktoberfest mode.

They had fled their Hilton Head home and businesses (Nancy and Chris own a candy store and a chocolate store) and ended up spending a week at an Athens, Ga., hotel.

Beyond the edge

Why Athens? It was beyond the expected edge of the storm and away from where they thought most evacuee traffic might clog highways. It turns out plenty of others had the same idea.

“More than I would have imagined at a SpringHill Suites in Athens,” Nancy Paris told me.

At least two-thirds of her daughter’s sixth grade class relocated to metro Atlanta. Other friends settled in Augusta, where evacuee parents in hotels set up group play dates for their kids.

All this wasn’t cheap. The Paris’ spent $1,200 on the hotel. Then there was the cost to board their two cats and 105-pound mutt at an Athens spot that offered a “hurricane discount.” And the cost of meals out (though they tried to eat crackers and sandwiches as much as they could). And the day outing to Helen, the two movies they saw in local theaters, the family membership they bought at Zoo Atlanta.

The full cost: well over $2,000. That’s enough to delay plans they had to take a Caribbean cruise next year.

There are other economic ramifications. The family’s candy and chocolate stores will have been shuttered for more than a week. One store needs a new canopy from the storm damage. And a 75-foot-tall tree is leaning against their Hilton Head home, which they returned to Wednesday. Other parts of their neighborhood apparently got hit by tornadoes.

“When you look at what you escaped,” Nancy Paris said, “I’d pay ten times as much, seeing what we walked back to.”