ORLANDO, Fl. — A Charleston attorney was down to two apples for sustenance as he rode out Hurricane Matthew with his wife Friday morning in Orlando, Florida, but Ed Rebrook said he was just happy to have shelter in the storm.
“I checked about nine different cities. I could not find a hotel room anywhere in Florida, anywhere,” Rebrook told Hoppy Kercheval from Orlando during Friday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
Rebrook had been staying in Cape Canaveral, Florida as Hurricane Matthew barreled through the Caribbean Sea as a Category 4 storm that claimed hundreds of lives, mostly in Haiti.
Early Friday, the storm was downgraded to a Category 3 storm with 120 mph winds.
In the U.S., more than three million people were told to evacuate from coastal areas in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Matthew, a rare October storm that has been called the most powerful Atlantic storm in more than a decade.
Rebrook ended up in Orlando after a friend let him know about a place with vacancies.
A drive from Cape Canaveral to Orlando usually takes Rebrook about 45 minutes. On Thursday, it was 2.5 hours as thousands of people heeded evacuation warnings.
“When we were going west, we saw the power trucks going east in a convoy,” Rebrook said.
About 30 miles south of Cape Canaveral and southeast of Orlando, Jim Davis, vice president and general manager for Vero Beach Broadcasters, was out surveying the damage in Vero Beach on Friday morning.
“There’s a lot of property damage, as you can imagine, lots of trees down and lots of debris all over the place, cars abandoned, water that made a surge off of the Barrier Islands,” Davis, an alum of WVAF-FM, V-100 in Charleston, reported on Friday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
“So there’s a lot of cleanup, I would say that, but the good news is we were spared lives and everyone in Florida is fairly prepared for this.”
At least one death in Florida was blamed on Hurricane Matthew.
Before Hurricane Matthew started hitting Thursday into Friday, traffic was at a crawl, Rebrook said.
“It was just amazing how many people were leaving, how slow it was and, of course, if there was a fender bender, which there were, it slowed things to a complete stop.”
When Rebrook and his wife made it to Orlando, businesses were closed and remained closed into Friday.
“Wal-Mart’s 200 yards away, it was closed, all the grocery stores, all the restaurants,” Rebrook said. “We got into a McDonald’s pull-through because we saw cars and a guy came up, waved us out, put a yellow cone in front of us and said, ‘No more.'”
As of early Friday afternoon, Hurricane Warnings from the National Weather Service remained in effect for an area stretching from central Florida into South Carolina, while Tropical Storm Warnings reached into North Carolina. Parts of southeast Virginia were under Flash Flood Warnings.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the southeast did not have power.
The storm track, again as of Friday morning, was projected to run parallel to the coast through Sunday, potentially producing a storm surge of up to ten feet along 500 miles of coastline from Florida to South Carolina.
Friday’s winds and rain may not be the last of Hurricane Matthew that Florida sees, according to meteorologists.
“Matthew, after it gets done doing its damage up the coast of the United States, may, in fact, make a loop — it would be a clockwise loop — and come back and visit us once again, probably next Tuesday or Wednesday, as a tropical storm,” Davis said.