Mandatory Evacuation of the Florida Keys
From the Sun-Sentinel weather blog: Keys orders mandatory evacuation of visitors
As Hurricane Ike maintains a course toward the Florida Keys, officials in the island chain this afternoon ordered a mandatory evacuation of visitors beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday.
A phased evacuation of all residents begins Sunday at 8 a.m.
Times and regions are as follows:
- Lower Keys and Key West: 8 a.m.;
- Middle Keys including Marathon: Noon;
- Upper Keys including Key Largo, Islamorada and mainland Monroe County: 4 p.m.
The recent shift in the track of Hurricane Ike makes this necessary.
15 comments
My cousin (from FL) is up here….he is putting his No Name Key house is on the market. I think he finally got sick of it all….then again, he’s @70 so I wouldn’t want to deal with a property down there at that age, either.
I hope it’s still there after Ike passes and he can get something for it.
I have a feeling that as much as she denies it, my Mother may not want to return if she has to evacuate again. The last time she stayed in Ohio for months with her sister.
Off topic: Bryan, what do you make of this?
This isn’t new to people in the county. I’m sure I wrote about it a while back.
The key to the system is integrity, and our retiring supervisor of elections, Pat Hollran has buckets of that.
She has been trying for years to find solutions for the military members of the community to vote while they are deployed without worrying about timing. In addition to standard deployments they know about, a lot of people get shipped out on short-term assignments with little notice.
This isn’t replacing the standard absentee ballot, this is designed to be in addition to that process.
I wouldn’t be surprised, knowing Pat, if this wasn’t a “belt and suspenders” operation, with people voting at the kiosks and filling out ballots for verification, with the deployment teams bringing the ballots back to the county. We have never been without a paper trail. We have the touchscreen machines for people with disabilities to use, as required by law, but she only bought them because it was the law.
It is experimental, but someone has to attempt the experiment, and the people in the county have known about this for some time.
I think that she must feel the report will be good, or she wouldn’t have applied to the state. She has been working on this for a very long time.
If the report is negative, she won’t do it.
I wrote about it back in May. The Miami Herald did a piece on it. I’ve known about it longer than that, probably the informal coffee group that includes some IT guys in government brought it up.
i thought i remembered your writing about the internet voting before. if it’s an electronic vote with an absentee ballot for the paper trail, it sounds like good idea. in case of discrepancy, the paper ballot would be vote counted, and in case of delays in delivering the absentee ballots, the electronic vote would function much the same way as getting your tax returns postmarked by midnight april 15, even if the actual paper doesn’t get to the irs until days or weeks later.
someday, when we all have our own personal gyrocopters and can fly out in any direction at a moment’s notice, i’m going to move down to key west.
I have fond childhood memories of Key West. You know, give me an earthquake anyday over a hurricane.
Pat is pretty careful about elections, and the plan involves having Okaloosa County election officials at the voting sites to verify eligibility just like early voting.
Some people in Oakland may have a different view this morning, Jill.
True, Bryan…but it was a little wussy shaker. A little reminder wake up call that they can get much worse.
The problem I had with them is the number of buildings on hillsides or the tops of canyons.
I knew too many people with “deathwish” houses in San Diego.
My relatives still don’t have power from Gustav. Got a call from one who was just fed up with no power in the Louisiana heat, and is relocating to Dallas until after Ike comes through. Unfortunately this reveals a bit of a hole in the evacuation procedures for South Louisiana communities — those procedures assume that people have power for their radios and televisions and can hear the evacuation notices. If Ike takes a Louisiana-ward turn after it finishes with Cuba (two models currently show it going that way, three others show it turning more towards the mouth of the Rio Grande), it’s gonna be bad…
As for earthquakes, I don’t hear or feel them because I’m under the end of the airport runway and my apartment is always rumbling and shaking anyhow. But the good thing is that you get some warning with hurricanes. You don’t get any warning with earthquakes. All I can do is keep a week’s worth of food in the place (and water treatment gear so I can purify a week’s worth of water fairly easily from local sources) and hope that it doesn’t all get smashed to pieces by the building shaking apart…
I have been avoiding saying that it looks like the consensus several times today is the mouth of the Mississippi again. No one needs that. Like you say, it’s hard for most stores to operate without power, so you are going to run out of batteries. Down here most gas stations have installed generators to pump gas without resorting to opening the fill cap and using a hand pump which some did after Ivan, but I doubt they’ve done that many other places.
I had the gas so I could recharge the cell phone and the computer while taking a nap in the air conditioning of the car after Ivan, but I didn’t have a radio on more than an hour a day in the house to avoid draining the batteries which I couldn’t buy if the power hadn’t been restored by the time the third set died.
That’s the thing about earthquakes, there’s no down time. Come Christmas the season is over, and you can relax a little. With earthquakes it’s 24/7/365.
True….24/7/365….but for 30-60 seconds or so.
At least hurricanes spend a little time destroying your house and all its contents.