MIAMI _ Hurricane Irma mercifully weakened before it swept much of Florida with hurricane-force gusts. But the gridlocked madhouse caused by the largest evacuation in Florida's history shows just how vulnerable runaway development has made one of the nation's fastest-growing states, emergency planners say.
"We have to stop and take a deep breath and ask, 'What are we doing?'" said David Paulison, a former Miami-Dade County fire chief who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President George W. Bush. "The more people we put here, the worse it's going to be for evacuation."
Irma could have been Florida's worst nightmare: A massive Category 5 hurricane wide enough to hit both of the state's densely populated coasts, where growth has boomed despite the obvious risks of living on the water in an area regularly walloped by storms. The push for more development _ one of Gov. Rick Scott's central policies in his successful effort to revive Florida's economy _ is elevating the risks to both people and property, said Craig Fugate, FEMA chief under President Barack Obama and the state's emergency management director under Gov. Jeb Bush.
"We're trying to evacuate more people over the same infrastructure," Fugate said. "It's something Florida has to revisit."
Even though Florida was spared from catastrophic damage, the evacuation _ which experts say saved lives _ felt like a disaster of its own to residents. Highways backed up for hours as people fled north. And state transit authorities were unwilling to change the direction of lanes because emergency vehicles and supplies needed to keep heading south toward the storm.
Valerie Preziosi and her husband Jan Svejkovsky left their home on Big Pine Key last Friday, along with their two cats. They booked a hotel room in Orlando but then changed course for Waldo, in north-central Florida, when the hotel didn't answer their calls. Then, as Irma wobbled, Waldo found itself at risk of flooding. Like many evacuees, they'd fled from one danger zone to another. So they drove even farther north to Macon, Ga.
"We kept getting pushed up because the storm was pushing behind us," Preziosi said.
The worst was yet to come: Getting back from Macon to Orlando _ normally a five-hour trip _ ended up being a ride from hell.
"It was horrible, I mean horrible," she said. "We were in 14 hours of traffic bumper to bumper."
With gas stations locked and powerless, "there was no way to use a restroom," Preziosi said, "so there were people in the middle of highway traffic getting out of their car. There was an elderly woman being dragged out so she could have a bowel movement in the middle of the road. The whole thing was so surreal."
That's not to say the evacuation was ill-advised: Irma missed a devastating direct hit, but the storm still wiped out parts of the Florida Keys and Marco Island, flooded Jacksonville and briefly turned downtown Miami's major thoroughfares into white-capped rivers. Getting people out was the safest move, said Gov. Rick Scott.
"My goal is keeping everybody alive," Scott said Wednesday at Homestead Air Reserve Base
If there is another major storm, "I'm going to do everything I can," the governor said, "to get everybody out of their homes and get everybody to shelter. ... It's an inconvenience to be displaced out of your home, it's an inconvenience to be without power, it's an inconvenience to try to find fuel, but the most important thing is survive."
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