The long avenues in West Palm Beach are deserted, stores are closed and shuttered, here and there a man struggles in the damp wind to board up his windows against the impending menace of Hurricane Frances, the worst storm to hit the state of Florida in 10 years.
”Shelter open,” a sign flashes, reminding people of the storm’s predicted landfall on Saturday. Two-and-a-half million people have been told to evacuate their homes along the coast from Miami at Florida’s southern tip to Jacksonville in the far north.
”We live in a condo that’s kind of old, that’s why we are here,” said Ron (50), after settling down at a West Palm Beach shelter operated by the Red Cross in an elementary school.
Twenty public buildings have been equipped to take in about 300 000 locals whose homes hug the beach in this coastal spot about 100km north of Miami.
Police have declared the beach off limits except to residents, and even they have been strongly urged to abandon the area entirely by late Friday at the very latest.
At 2am local time, the main highway hugging Florida’s eastern coastline was clogged with vehicles heading north, away from the area under threat by Hurricane Frances. North of here, in Orlando, an identical traffic jam was crawling along, according to live local television footage.
If Frances maintains its present north-west course, barrelling among the Bahamas at 15kph, it should make landfall in Florida at 8pm local time on Saturday. The Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said its eye is targeting Vero Beach, 70km north of West Palm Beach.
The storm was advancing slowly but sustained winds whipping around its eye have been clocked at 195kph. They have been weakening, however, and the storm has been downgraded to a level-three hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which reaches a maximum of five.
Forecasters have cautioned, however, that Frances could intensify as it moves over the warmer Gulf stream off the coast of Florida.
The Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, halfway up the Florida coast, has been closed, its 14 000 employees sent home and every precaution taken to protect installations, including the space shuttles, from wind damage, Nasa said.
Authorities expect the worst damage in the urban shorefront of south-eastern Florida, where storm surge flooding of about 3m above normal tide levels are forecast.
Most airlines have cancelled all flights on Saturday and Sunday to Orlando, West Palm Beach and Miami. In Fort Lauderdale and Cape Canaveral, port facilities have been closed to cargo vessels and cruise ships.
Governor Jeb Bush has urged Floridians to get out of the way of danger and obey instructions from authorities, saying Frances is not a hurricane to be taken lightly.
People appear to be following his advice, especially since less than three weeks ago Charley, a hurricane half the size of Frances, slammed into Punta Gorda, on the Gulf of Mexico just north of Fort Myears, killing 27 people and causing $7-billion in damage. — Sapa-AFP