ATLANTA (AP) – Floridians fleeing Hurricane Irma have turned freeways across the Southeast into red ribbons of brake lights as they head elsewhere – to Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville – to bunk with relatives, stay at campgrounds or grab hotels before the massive storm makes landfall.
Because Interstate 75 north leads straight to Atlanta, thousands of the evacuees have funneled into the city. Other cars and trucks with Florida plates, a few carrying fishing boats, trekked on to Tennessee.
“We just packed the car up again like Okies and we’re going to Memphis,” Suzanne Pallot of Miami said Friday on her cellphone, somewhere on a stretch of Interstate 20 near Birmingham, Alabama.
Pallot traveled 21 hours from Miami to Atlanta, arriving Thursday in a Mazda SUV packed with four other people, their luggage and two cats. She and her brother are sharing the back seat with his luggage in the middle, she said.
In Florida, they found lines for gas 100 to 150 cars long. Pallot and her companions started looking for an available hotel room in Ocala, Florida, and went nearly 200 miles into Georgia, still searching. “There was absolutely nothing,” Pallot said.