6:00pm: Sportsline with Tony Caridi

West Virginia natives among those affected by Hurricane Irma

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Ahead of Hurricane Irma’s landfall early Sunday morning, millions of people in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas have evacuated their homes as storm continued to approach the Florida Keys.

One of those who left their home was Kristen Ewing, a Follansbee native, who said on Friday’s MetroNews “Talkline” she is in Atlanta with more than 300 students of the Delray Beach, Florida boarding school where she teaches.

Kristen Ewing

“For the children’s safety, we decided as Broward County and as a school district to get the students out and head to Georgia,” she said. “If I was by myself, I probably would have stayed to be in my own apartment, but for the kids I definitely left.”

Delray Beach is part of the Miami-metropolitan area.

Ewing, who moved to Florida in June, said it took the school 24 hours to make the 614-mile trip to Atlanta.

“We were going 20 miles per hour the whole time,” she said. “When we started to get the traffic flowing, we would have to come to a sudden stop. People were driving on the shoulders.”

Gary Mertins, former Morgantown resident and West Virginia Radio Corporation employee, said when he was leaving, he saw businesses that we still open.

“Most people have been through this before, so they’ll be closing their shops up,” he said. “For the most people, a lot of people are just planning to hunker down. Not move and just hunker down.”

Mertins said he lives on the side of the ocean and was forced to evacuate for safety reasons.

FirstEnergy Utilities announced Friday it will send 900 utility workers to Florida for restoration efforts, with crews leaving as early as Saturday morning.

FirstEnergy is the parent company of Mon Power and Potomac Edison.

“While it’s not expected that Hurricane Irma will impact any FirstEnergy service territories, we have carefully assessed conditions and are confident we have the personnel in place to maintain reliable operations for our customers, while also assisting those in need in Florida,” said Steven Strah, senior vice president and president of FirstEnergy, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the decision to leave remains a difficult one for many people. One 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.

“I actually got out probably just at the right time,” Virginia Beach native and Marshall alumni Alex 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 said his friends and colleagues who left later than he did reported traffic is doubling and tripling normal trips and exhausting supplies at gas stations along the road 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 were under mandatory evacuation as of Saturday morning.

“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.

Reed said the question to evacuate isn’t as simple as some make it out to be.

“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.





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