FORT MYERS, Fl. — A Marshall University alumni is grateful he made it out of the path of Hurricane Irma before the major traffic jams that have slowed interstates to a crawl in the southern U.S.
Alex Reed, a Virginia Beach, Virginia native and Marshall alumni, said traffic is doubling and tripling normal trips and exhausting supplies at gas stations along the road north.
“I actually got out probably just at the right time,” Reed said Friday on WAJR’s Morgantown AM. “I’m currently in my home town in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I went up pretty far north.”
Reed calls play-by-play in broadcasts for the Florida Everblades, a minor league affiliate of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes. It’s the off-season for him right now, but Reed was originally planning to remain in Florida to wait out the storm before making a spur of the moment decision early Wednesday morning.
“My original plan was just to go to Tampa Wednesday afternoon to stay with a friend,” he said. “I got to thinking about how the size of that storm is going to cover the width of the state. It just kind of got me concerned that I didn’t know if Tampa was going to be much better.”
Reed did some minor work at his home before fleeing in the dead of night — one a.m. Wednesday morning.
“A lot of the exits that have gas stations there are out of gas,” he said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty. That’s what everyone’s facing down there. Do you get in a car and fight the traffic?”
5.6 million people are under mandatory evacuation.
“There are people still there, and not, I think, by choice for a lot of them,” Reed said. “Certainly, there are some that are just going to wait it out and they’re not phased at all.
But the question remains enormously difficult for some as Irma heads for Florida, according to Reed. For many, simply packing up isn’t an option.
“I do have several friends that I know and co-workers that do want to get out and just don’t really know what decision to make at this point because they just don’t know how far they can get — especially with all the hotels booked as well,” he said. “They just don’t want to get stuck on the road.”
The storm is about 400 miles in diameter and made landfall in Cuba as a Category 5. It is expected to hit Florida sometime Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane.