Florida opens up hotel rooms, ports to Florence evacuees
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ORLANDO, Fla. — With Hurricane Florence barrelling toward their home near Wilmington, North Carolina, Allison Hales Jordan and her husband boarded up their house, packed up their car and headed to Walt Disney World in Florida with their two teenage children.
“When we decided where to go, everybody was going west, but we decided we should go as far south as possible, which is weird since Florida gets hurricanes,” said Jordan who works as a preschool director in Burgaw, North Carolina.
Long accustomed to its residents evacuating north or to other parts of the state when hurricanes threaten, Florida was in the unusual position this week of accommodating diverted cruise ships and hotel-room seekers hoping to escape the wrath of Hurricane Florence, which made landfall Friday morning in North Carolina.
State emergency officials said Thursday they had no way of tracking how many residents from the Carolinas had escaped to Florida this week. But Florida hotels were offering special discounts for hurricane evacuees and Florida ports were opening their terminals to cruise ships making unexpected ports of call.
