The first thing everyone tells you to do is fill up your gas tank. When a Category 5 hurricane almost the size of Texas is looming just around the corner, you want to make sure you have enough fuel to get the hell out of town. My family and I got a late start. The day after Labor Day, we returned to Miami after a weeklong vacation, so while everyone was stocking up on batteries, candles, and non-perishables, we were still going through customs. On the ride home from the airport, we learned that most of our friends and family had already begun plotting their escapes. Some were flying out to New York, Portland, Oregon, even Aruba. Others were thinking of outrunning it by driving out west to Tampa and then New Orleans. Only a few were considering staying and roughing it out. It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that Hurricane Irma was forecast to clobber Miami with catastrophic 165 mph winds, but by Tuesday night, it had already become impossible to find a plane ticket out of the city. My husband spent hours frantically searching online, but everything was either sold out or financially impossible: The best option he could find were tickets to Panama City, Florida, for $3,000 each, and then there were my mother-in-law’s three dogs to consider. Needless to say, we were driving. On Wednesday morning, we hit the supermarket early to stock up on supplies. Water had disappeared quickly from the shelves and entire aisles of canned food were gone. I peeked into carts to get an idea of what other people were buying: Gatorade, evaporated milk, crackers, cereal. One woman had two bags of charcoal and packets of sausages. As others headed out to grocery store after grocery store in search of water, a friend of ours gave us a tip: “Instead of heading to Costco or Publix like everyone else,” said Fernando Delgado, a digital product manager, “go to a gas station convenience store—nobody is looking for water there.” Sure enough, at the nearest Marathon station, the refrigerators were packed with bottles. We loaded up. Early on Thursday morning, we set out for Orlando where we planned to spend the night, wait for an updated forecast, and weigh our options. With a full tank of gas, we drove out towards Disney World in a car packed with three adults, one toddler, and three dogs. Typically, the drive takes three hours. That Thursday, it took us six and a half. (We were lucky: others along the same route reported a 14-hour drive.) Governor Rick Scott ordered mandatory evacuations for parts of more than 15 counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Those three counties alone are home to roughly six million people, all of whom seemingly hit the road at once. It didn’t help matters that Florida is a peninsula-shaped state with only two major highways. The roads were clogged with cars inching their way north. I heard two separate people compare the situation to The Walking Dead. By Friday, meteorologists were saying that the storm had shifted west and was on track to directly impact Orlando by Sunday evening. Our group text message became a brainstorm session: Could we go to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Charlotte, North Carolina, or Greenville, South Carolina? We decided to drive to Atlanta, where we could stay with family. The GPS said it would take us seven hours to get there. After driving for that amount of time, we checked the GPS again, which now said we had another five and a half hours to go. Physically and emotionally drained, we re-routed to Jacksonville, Florida, for the night to rest and recharge. “That was the worst part,” says Aquiles Tartaret, a friend of a friend who drove out of Miramar, Florida. “Every 30 minutes or so, the GPS would add another hour to the route. And then another hour. It was torture.” Even those fortunate few in possession of plane tickets to higher ground could suddenly find themselves in a tight spot. Alfredo Garcia, a financial entrepreneur, had plans to fly out of Miami to New York on Friday morning with his wife, who is five months pregnant, only to learn on Wednesday afternoon that their flight had been canceled. In a panic, his wife booked tickets out of Savannah, Georgia, for Thursday morning. “We were supposed to drive all night long to get there, but couldn’t make it,” he explains. “By the time we tried to book a later flight out of Savannah, everything was gone.” They ended up sleeping in Jacksonville and then driving to Charlotte to catch a flight to New York. My sister-in-law, Anna Lee Schmand, had originally planned on staying in Miami and waiting out the hurricane, but by Friday afternoon, she realized her building was nearly empty. Out of 150 units, only four tenants had decided to stay. “It was a ghost town,” Schmand said. “Plus, we were in an evacuation zone, so if anything were to happen, nobody could come to help us out.” (Emergency personnel are not legally obligated to rescue those who willingly stay in an evacuation zone, and are sometimes prohibited from doing so. Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn told CNN that “if the winds are consistently at 40 mph or greater, our police and firefighters cannot” go get them.) On Friday at 2 p.m., two hours after the cutoff that Scott suggested for evacuating Floridians, Schmand and her mother left for Atlanta with a three-quarter-full tank of gas. They made good time to Orlando, but from then on, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic. By 10:00 p.m., they started looking for a hotel room close to the highway to spend the night. Everything was booked. They drove for another couple of hours, continued checking, and still, nothing was available. “Even the rest stops had a line to get in,” Schmand said. “We ended up going to the parking lot of a hotel to rest our eyes for an hour at 3 a.m.” After 22 hours, they reached Atlanta. While a 22-hour crawl up the highway is no one’s idea of a thrill ride, plenty of Floridians didn’t have even that luxury. Multiple gas refills and hotel stays are expensive; some jobs don’t give employees the option to miss work; some residents, like the elderly and the disabled, are often too vulnerable to leave in a hurry. As for our own personal odyssey, after three days of driving and roughly 56 hours on the road (and one too many gas station bathrooms), we made it to Atlanta late Saturday afternoon. There, our family was waiting with burgers on the grill, freshly made beds, and a sturdy house that looked like it could confidently withstand Irma, which was set to arrive in Georgia as a tropical storm. The next day, we learned that Irma, which had weakened significantly after making landfall in the Florida Keys, had left at least five people dead (now, even more) and millions without power in Miami, where the roads were littered with trees and debris. Thankfully, our apartment hadn’t flooded, and our loved ones were accounted for and okay. We’d avoided the worst-case scenarios we’d all feared—but our respite was short-lived. All of the Florida evacuees, at least those on my group text messages, suddenly found a brand-new preoccupation to worry about: How the hell were we going to get back home?
It Took Us 56 Hours on the Road to Escape from Hurricane Irma
Photo: Shutterstock
