Evacuees and travelers from Florida arrive in Chicago ahead of Hurricane Milton landfall
CHICAGO (WLS) -- Floridians are making the mad dash out of the Sunshine State and back to the Chicago area Wednesday as Hurricane Milton barrels toward the coast as a Category 3 storm.
The last flight from Jacksonville, Florida arrived in Chicago Wednesday morning, and there are no more fights out of Orlando, Tampa Bay, or St. Petersburg.
ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch
People arriving back described a frenzied race to the airports before the expected wrath of the storm.
Erica Ince and her family delayed their trip to Walt Disney World for their 2-year-old's birthday after the theme park and its properties decided to temporarily close down in anticipation of Milton.
"It seems pretty horrific what's coming, but we always know last minute it can take a turn. We're kinda hoping for the best," Ince said.
Hurricane Milton closes in on Florida, time to evacuate is running out | LIVE RADAR
Ince and her family are instead heading to Savannah, Georgia, where they'll spend the next few days in hopes of eventually making it to Florida.
Chicago native turned Naples, Florida resident Steven Haas was going to stick it out, but at the last minute decided he didn't want to risk his 81-year-old mother's safety. She lives with him.
He drove more than 1000 miles across the state to Ft. Lauderdale after booking one of the last available hotel rooms there.
"When we saw the storm surge steadily increase. First they were playing it down, and then all of a sudden, when they made it 5 to 8 feet there's no way i could survive that," he said.
And Milton is arriving as many who live there, like St. Petersburg residents Jay and Martie Phillips, haven't had time to recover from Hurricane Helene.
"When you don't really know how much more you have, the potential to get, you have this horrible vision of, 'Is this the way I'm going to die?' Like, I'm going to drown in here," Martie Phillips said.
The River North couple's home was decimated when Helene left more than a foot of water inside and destroyed both their cars.
"Martie and I, we can replace the fridge. We can replace the cars. But it's the memories, the cards, the pictures. The things you cannot replace. That's what hurts the most," Jay Phillips said.
Maggie Hoopis, who live in Wilmette, and her family were one of the lucky ones able to escape the storm just in time, cutting their own Disney trip short.
She said they frantically tried to book several flights that kept getting canceled out of Orlando and eventually opted to drive to Jacksonville to fly back to Chicago from there.
"Well, we were watching because it just started as a tropical storm when we were down there. And we were like oh we're going to be OK, and then it just gradually amped up and category size and we were like oh this isn't as good as we thought it would be," Hoopis said "We were trying to keep her calm, so she didn't really know what was going on. So my husband was on the phone a lot of times, trying to figure out which way do we go."
As people flee the path of the storm, local ComEd crews are heading toward it to help Tampa Electric in anticipation of Hurricane Milton.
ComEd is sending 60 underground employees to help repair damage and restore service.
Later, the nearly 200 line workers currently assisting in Georgia and South Carolina from Hurricane Helene will be re-deployed to Florida.
"This has been a very significant hurricane season," Nichole Owens, ComEd VP of Distribution Operations said. "We've seen a lot of devastation. We even experienced some of that here in July, where we had utilities and other contractors that had to come and support and help us with our customers to do safe restoration of our infrastructure. So these types of organizations that help pull together resources across the nation is really helpful because now we get to return the favor and support a lot of our customers and customers that are down in Florida."
