FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.: South Carolina’s governor said she would issue an evacuation order Wednesday so that 1 million people would have time to leave the coast ahead of Hurricane Matthew, and residents up and down the Eastern seaboard entered better-safe-than-sorry mode, flocking to hardware stores, grocery aisles and gas stations to prepare for the powerful storm.
Matthew was on track to rake Florida before spinning up the East Coast. The Category 4 storm packing winds of 145 mph pummeled parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Tuesday and is expected to head north over Cuba and the Bahamas before nearing the Florida coast by Thursday. At least 11 people in the Caribbean have died.
In Haiti, the storm blew ashore around dawn in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, hitting a corner of the nation where many people live in shacks of wood or concrete blocks.
Damage in the hardest-hit part of Haiti appeared to be widespread, but because of spotty communications, blocked roads and washed-out bridges, the full extent was not immediately clear. Nor was the number of deaths.
The country’s Civil Protection Agency said many homes were damaged or destroyed.
“It’s the worst hurricane that I’ve seen during my life,” said Fidele Nicolas, a civil protection official in Nippes, just east of where Matthew came ashore. “It destroyed schools, roads, other structures.”
The National Hurricane Center in Miami issued a hurricane watch for a 260-mile stretch from Golden Beach near Fort Lauderdale to the Daytona Beach area, meaning hurricane force winds of 74 mph or higher could occur within two days.
In South Florida, lines at grocery stores were heavier than usual and some essentials were in short supply. When Simone Corrado and her husband tried to buy water at their Publix in Davie near Fort Lauderdale, they mostly found empty shelves. There were a few bottles of high-end water brands, but there was so much empty shelf space that Corrado lay down and fully stretched out on the bottom shelf.
“I got scared because all that was left at Publix was just the pricey water,” said Corrado, who lived through 1992’s catastrophic Hurricane Andrew, which practically leveled the nearby city of Homestead. “They really put the fear into you here. On the television screen every few minutes is the ‘beep, beep, beep’ storm alert.”
Gov. Rick Scott, speaking in the Daytona area, warned residents they must be prepared to take a direct hit and evacuation orders could be issued. Scott said his biggest worry is that residents won’t take seriously the threat from Matthew, especially since so many newer residents have never lived through a hurricane.
“Don’t take a chance. Leave before it’s too late,” he said. “We have to be prepared to be hit by a catastrophic hurricane.”
Hurricane Hermine became the first to strike Florida since Wilma in 2005 when it hit the eastern Panhandle on Sept. 2 as a Category 1 storm, causing one death, storm surge damage to beachfront homes and downed trees and powerlines. That 11-year lull between storms hitting Florida was the longest on record.
The last storm to hit the Atlantic side of Florida was Hurricane Katrina, which struck in 2005 on its way to devastating the Gulf coast.
Wilma made landfall as a Category 3 storm with 120 mph winds, killing five people as it pushed from southwest Florida, through the Everglades and into the Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach area, causing an estimated $21 billion in damage and leaving thousands of residents without power for more than a week. It concluded a two-year span when a record eight hurricanes hit the state.
Governors in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina declared states of emergency. President Barack Obama canceled campaign and health care events in Florida on Wednesday and would instead visit the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Some airlines let passengers change travel plans without penalty if their trip might be affected by Matthew.
Gov. Nikki Haley said state officials would reverse lanes on major evacuation routes in South Carolina. It would be the first major evacuation since Hurricane Floyd in 1999, when the governor at the time didn’t reverse the lanes and Interstate 26 became a parking lot.
“We’ve been though winter storms. We’ve been through a 1,000-year flood. A hurricane is different. I don’t want anyone to look at the last couple of tragedies we’ve gone through and think this is similar,” Haley said.