'Where Were They?' Only 5,000 Of 350,000 People Showed Up At Shelters

PINELLAS COUNTY, FL — It was a bet even veteran forecasters were unwilling to place.

Just 12 hours before Hurricane Ian was due to make landfall, the National Hurricane Center still couldn't say with any conviction where Ian's eye would strike Florida's west coast.

Up until then, all models showed the hurricane making a beeline for Tampa Bay. Then, on Tuesday morning, the hurricane showed signs of shifting to the south, targeting Venice.

Even so, Gov. Ron DeSantis warned residents living along the west coast not to let down their guard, recalling the path of Hurricane Charley in 2004.

"Charley was originally forecast to go into Tampa Bay and then made a sudden turn and hit southwest Florida," said DeSantis.

Stay up to date by viewing all Hurricane Ian coverage on Patch here.

"It could still wobble and send the hurricane in a different direction," DeSantis said. "We've seen that before. Tampa Bay is not out of the woods. And even if it doesn't hit Tampa Bay directly, what we have here is really historic storm surge and flooding. The storm surge you're going to see generated from this event will far eclipse what we saw with Charley."

Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for 2.5 million people from Fort Myers to Pasco County, and DeSantis urged residents to heed them.

By late Tuesday night, however, Hurricane Ian made another shift, this time further south.

On the morning of Sept. 28, Ian intensified into a Category 4 hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, just shy of a Category 5 storm.

According to the National Hurricane Center, which has released a video timeline of the hurricane's path aptly titled, "Hurricane Ian's Path of Destruction," at 3:05 p.m., the hurricane set its sights on Cayo Costa, a virtually uninhabited island and state park located 12 miles west of Cape Coral. It struck the island as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, tying the record for the fifth-strongest hurricane on record to strike the United States and the first Category 4 hurricane to hit Southwest Florida since Charley in 2004.

From Cayo Costa, it was just an 11-mile hop to Sanibel, Captiva and Pine islands, which have a combined population of 15,700 people. Hurricane Ian slammed into the islands with an unprecedented storm surge of 12 to 18 feet above ground level. The hurricane then turned its attention to Fort Myers, battering the city with hurricane-force winds, heavy rainfall and a 7.26-foot surge, a record high.

Pinellas County Commissioner Dave Eggers said he watched the devastation in horror, just imagining the destruction Hurricane Ian would have wreaked on Tampa Bay.

"My God, I think it woke us all up to see those storm surges," said Eggers. "We've dealt with a lot of winds before, but that storm surge was unfathomable."

"I think that was part of what people didn't really understand," Pinellas County Administrator Barry Burton said. "They were originally projecting storm surge up to 15 feet coming toward the (Tampa) bay."

If that scenario had been realized, the chance of anyone surviving in Pinellas County's evacuation zones would have been bleak, he said.

But, apparently, the majority of Pinellas County residents in the evacuation zones were willing to take that chance.

On Sept. 26, Pinellas County declared mandatory evacuations for all residents living in Zone A and all mobile homes. Simultaneously, Burton said the county called for the evacuation of all 99 long-term care facilities in Pinellas County.

Then, at 7 a.m. on Sept. 27, the county called for evacuations for all residents living in Zones B and C and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced he was shutting down access to the county's barrier islands by midnight.

Burton said the county began mobilizing all of the resources needed to carry out its hurricane plan when the Pinellas County Commission declared a state of emergency on Sept 24.

"There's only so much you can do to plan for something like that coming at you but we were as ready as we could be," Burton said.

Working with Pinellas emergency management officials, the sheriff's office and the school district, "we brought the entire community together, every municipality, every nonprofit from homeless to housing services together, over 250 people," Burton said.

Together, those groups made the decision to declare the mandatory evacuations.

"These calls are difficult because you're asking everyone to take action to move people out, and no one takes it lightly," he said.

The county opened 25 general population shelters and three special-needs shelters with full medical capabilities. It had food, water and other provisions on hand to accommodate the evacuees.

"We converted buses to transport special needs residents," he said. "Ultimately, we came together as a community. We had the shelters open and we had them staffed."

Nevertheless, only 5,000 of the 350,000 Pinellas County residents ordered to evacuate showed up at the shelters.

"During Irma (2017), there were 22,000 people in shelters," Burton said. "So where were they? My guess is we were going to be doing a lot of rescues."

With that in mind, Pinellas County prepositioned high-water vehicles manned by members of the Florida National Guard around the county while the sheriff placed rescue boats in strategic locations in anticipation of having to make water rescues.

"That's the number that scared me the most," said Pinellas County Commission Chairman Charlie Justice. "We have 350,000 people living in the evacuation zones and only 5,000 of them showed up at the shelters. I still don't believe there were 345,000 people that found other places to shelter. during those 24 to 48 hours."

It wasn't only residents who resisted evacuating until the county made it mandatory, Burton said.

"We saw that hotels wouldn't close down even out on the beach without the mandatory evacuation orders, and we saw that some of our long-term care facilities wouldn't move people without the mandatory evacuation," he said.

Eggers said telling people to leave their homes and belongings behind and head to higher ground is never an easy to make.

"You try to find a balance between overreacting and underreacting," he said. "It is a really difficult decision."

In the end, however, Eggers said he thought the Pinellas hurricane team made the right call.

"I just can't fathom the machine that has to be put together from the most high-level planning to the most minute detail before, during and after a hurricane," Eggers said. "It's a herculean effort to keep people safe during these storms. I was just incredibly impressed."

Burton said the hurricane team will be putting together an after-action review.

"There were a lot of lessons learned and there's always room to improve," he said.

Justice said he hopes Pinellas County families will consider doing their own after-action reviews after seeing the devastation that occurred in the Fort Myers area.

"Maybe it will spark that desire for folks to want to plan," he said. "No one wants to be in the situation that the folks south of us are in. And we just encourage our residents to take every step necessary to make sure that they're ready because you do not want to place your family in harm's way when we're dealing with something like this."

See related stories:

• Hurricane Ian: DeSantis Says Tampa Bay Shouldn't Let Down Its Guard
• Hurricane Ian: Timeline To Anticipated Devastation In Tampa Bay
• Ian To Be Category 4 By Morning, 'Rush' To Prepare: NWS