As the threat of Hurricane Ian’s storm-force winds, damaging rain and potentially destructive storm surges drew nearer, southwest Florida residents rushed to board up their homes and join the lines of cars leaving the shore.
“You can’t do anything about natural disasters,” said Vinod Nair, who drove inland from the Tampa area Tuesday with his wife, son, dog and two kittens, seeking a hotel in Orlando, where only tropical-storm force winds were expected. “We live in a high risk zone, so we thought it best to evacuate.”
Ian rapidly intensified as it neared landfall along Florida's southwest coast Wednesday morning, gaining top winds of 155 mph (250 kph), just shy of the most dangerous Category 5 status. Damaging winds and rain lashed the state, and the heavily populated Naples to Sarasota region was at highest risk of a devastating storm surge. The massive storm appeared on track to slam ashore somewhere north of Fort Myers and some 125 miles (201 kilometers) south of Tampa, sparing the bay area from a rare direct hit from a hurricane.
Ian made landfall Wednesday afternoon as a destructive Category 4 storm.
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Kevin Guthrie, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said 2.5 million people were under some kind of evacuation order. Those who lived along the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Florida were urged to evacuate east across the state.
Alexander Burks, who lives along the Hillsborough River not far from downtown Tampa in a mandatory evacuation zone, spoke to NBC News as he prepared to evacuate Tuesday.
"The storm surge is our biggest worry, but also the high winds and rain," Burks, 50, said as he boarded up the windows of his home and built a wall of sandbags to protect his property.
Gini Roberts, who lives in an evacuation zone in south Tampa, grabbed her dog and fled about 40 miles inland to Lakeland, in Polk County, where they checked into a hotel they had stayed in during previous hurricanes.
“It is what it is," Roberts told NBC affiliate WFLA of Tampa. “I’d rather be alive, and I hope my house is there when I get back. I hope my house isn’t flooded."
Anna Griggs put down sandbags on the doorstep of the Tampa home just blocks from the bay where she lives with her two teenagers. They were preparing to evacuate and stay in a hotel, but Griggs said she worried what they might find when they return home after the storm — she told NBC Nightly News that she stands to lose a significant part of her livelihood if their home is damaged.
“It's partly that, but it's also the fact that this is our home,” she said. She worried about the effect that it could have on her kids. “I mean, this is childhood. This is their roots. This is attachment. Yeah. And that could be severely damaged, if that’s destroyed. Yeah, that's the scary part. To me."
Not everyone was heeding orders to evacuate, however, as some hoped to hunker down, stay put and ride out the storm.
Darin Freeman of Tampa said she chose not to voluntarily evacuate from her home. “My family had a discussion on what’s best to do,” she told NBC News. “My husband grew up in Tampa, Florida, and is comfortable staying due to the location of our house. We took all of the precautions to make sure our family would be safe, such as boarding up windows, purchasing a generator, draining our pool and stocking up on food, water, gas and oil. We’ve done all we can do to prepare and outside of that we hope for the best.”
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Still, many residents, like Gil Gonzalez, weren’t taking any chances. He and his wife boarded the windows of their Tampa home with plywood, laid down sandbags and packed their car with bottled water, flashlights, battery packs for their cellphones and a camp stove before evacuating. “All the prized possessions, we’ve put them upstairs in a friend’s house," Gonzalez said.
