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December 2005                                                                            Volume 9 - Number 3

Hurricane Season...

Hurricane Wilma’s Evacuation Efforts
By Carmelo Melendez

At one stage, Wilma was the strongest hurricane ever recorded, and the US National Hurricane Center warned it remains as "potentially catastrophic". At one stage, the storm measured the lowest barometric pressure on record in the Atlantic basin - a measure of its strength. Mexican authorities told tourists to leave high-risk areas along the coast near the holiday resort of Cancun. In Mexico, troops and federal police were called out to control looting in Cancun, and officials struggled to evacuate an estimated 30,000 stranded tourists. In Cuba, as many as 500,000 residents were evacuated from dilapidated housing and low-lying areas.

In Florida, shelters opened and residents of mobile homes and low-lying areas were told to leave. U.S. space agency NASA closed its Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic coast of central Florida and told its 13,000 workers to stay home on Monday. About 160,000 people in the state of Florida were under mandatory evacuation orders, including the entire population of the Florida Keys island chain, according to officials and Census data. There was no way of knowing exactly how many actually left, but it appeared only about 20 percent of the 78,000 Keys residents fled Officials in the vulnerable Florida Keys island chain ordered visitors and non-residents to leave immediately. Emergency officials issued the first evacuation orders for the Florida mainland on Friday in advance of slow-moving but powerful Hurricane Wilma, and Keys residents were also asked to start leaving. The mandatory order, effective at noon, covered part of the Gulf Coast town of Naples and the nearby snowbird enclave of Marco Island. The order came two days after tourists were directed to leave the Keys. Most did, but some residents of the island chain didn't seem in a hurry to leave Friday, even as the storm closed in on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

At the Greystone Mobile Home Park near Marco Island about 100 miles to the north, most residents of the 295 homes had left, although a handful of old-timers resisted. "A state policeman told me to take a permanent marker and write their names on their heads, arms and legs (so their bodies could be identified). And when I tell them that they're like, 'OK we'll go,'" said Ellen Guidis, the park's manager. "Very few" residents of the Florida Keys heeded the evacuation order, said Billy Wagner, manager of the Monroe County Emergency Operations Center. Those people had ignored the pleas of officials including Gov. Jeb Bush, who earlier Sunday emphasized that remaining behind was a bad idea. The Chief of Police in Naples Florida estimated that about 75 percent of residents in the city's coastal areas had left. Still, about one-fourth of the residents of Naples chose to stay and in Key West, local officials said that about 80 percent of residents are holding out. There, an almost carnival-like atmosphere prevailed in some small gatherings in the city's downtown, where people boasted of having ridden out other storms.

An underlying worry after Hurricane Wilma could again be growing complacency. More than 30,000 people went to public shelters, but because Wilma did not deliver a knockout punch after days of warning, some worry that residents may be more likely to try to ride out the next hurricane. Most longtime Floridians have grown accustomed to the hurricane threat and have adopted their own ways of evaluating when to evacuate. Their calculations depend on forecast wind speed and storm surge but are only loosely related to the warnings of emergency officials.