Officials to residents: Be patient and stay indoors
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published September 5, 2004
TALLAHASSEE -- Florida, the state that survives by welcoming visitors with open arms, sent the opposite message to the outside world Sunday: Stay out.
That stern directive applies not only to visitors, but even to its own residents. Thousands of stir-crazy Floridians are marooned at hotels along Interstate 75 in Georgia and are itching to drive home and see what kind of calling card Hurricane Frances left behind. But Gov. Jeb Bush wants them to stay away.
From Bush on down, the state's political heirarchy was advising residents against returning home, until Tuesday at the earliest.
"Our encouragement to others is to stay out," Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings said in a nationwide TV interview. "If you're already out of the storm area, stay out, and if you're in the storm area, stay inside."
Jennings, appearing on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, said the reason for the order is twofold: to clear a path for disaster teams, utility workers and others who are coming to the rescue, and for the safety of evacuees themselves to avoid downed power lines, flooded streets and other hazards.
Florida emergency management director Craig Fugate said many of the deaths after Charley three weeks ago were not directly from the storm, but from car accidents to electrocution to carbon monoxide poisoning, after the winds died down.
"Let the emergency crews get their jobs done," Fugate said on CNN.
Unlike Hurricane Charley, which bulldozed across the state three weeks ago, Frances is dithering, like an unwelcome house guest who refuses to leave. An estimated 4-million people, nearly one-fourth of the state's population, has no electricity, and disaster experts expect the outages to worsen as the storm moves through Tampa Bay and takes aim at the Panhandle on Monday.
Fugate also stressed Florida's resiliency: "We're going to rebuild. We're going to recover," he said.
As Frances hovered over central Florida Sunday, state disaster experts began planning for possible evacuations of low-lying areas of the Panhandle from Wakulla County to Apalachicola. Residents of counties along the Gulf of Mexico were warned to make plans for a tropical storm with hurricane-force winds.
"As we say in the Panhandle, 'y'all git. Time to go,' " Fugate said.
