Nursing homes evacuated as Hurricane Helene bears down on the Florida Panhandle

AccuWeather

As Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified on its way toward Florida on Sept. 25, first responders evacuated elderly residents from nursing homes to get them to safety.

Transcript

00:00We continue our team coverage right now with storm chaser Aaron Rigsby who joins us live now from Crawfordville, Florida, Aaron

00:09Yeah, good evening guys as you can see right here behind me this has been a common theme throughout the evening

00:13We've got boarded up windows here at the local auto zone and earlier

00:16They were open and since then you can see that it's been x'd out

00:20They are closing down and many businesses here are following suit

00:23Now the wind dixie is available until later on this evening before they do close their doors

00:28But walmart however has shut down their doors and a lot of folks that thought they were going to stay behind

00:32Are now packing up their bags and leaving now that we could be facing down the barrel of a category 4 hurricane

00:38And aaron we're going to be dealing with some huge huge impacts in this area

00:42uh, are there many people out and about since they closed up or

00:46Are many people basically gone at this point evacuating to higher ground or just hunkering in their own home?

00:54It appears that a lot of folks are taking this one very seriously

00:57There's still a decent amount of traffic going by but I can tell that they've had a lot of trailers and boats attached to them

01:03So I can tell that these are residents packing up and leaving a lot of the local businesses have shut down

01:07For the next day at least so not a lot of folks are going to have to report at work or coming home from work

01:12And have to pack things up last minute here

01:14I think everyone realized the caliber of this storm

01:16Which is what we've been so worried about all year with those volatile conditions that have existed over the gulf of mexico

01:21And unfortunately, jolene's going to be able to take full advantage of those as we draw closer to tomorrow evening

01:27And you've been sharing some footage of people in wheelchairs people in a slightly more advanced age in nursing homes at

01:35Retirement communities that have been getting some assistance in getting to safety

01:39What have you learned about some of those?

01:41Cases and maybe that place where you visited with the camera earlier today

01:45Is everybody out or was it just an option for some of the residents?

01:48So those particular folks were in a mandatory evacuation area

01:51So they were priority number one a lot of them were bound to wheelchairs and they had the local fire department

01:56To assist those and getting them onto charter buses and taking them well inland because that's going to be another thing that stands out

02:02With this particular hurricane the forward speed is going to be very fast upwards of 25 miles an hour

02:06So we're going to see impacts that we don't normally see a lot further inland and they're taking these folks either very far west

02:12Or very far east and as those drivers are getting closer to safety

02:15West or very far east and as those draw closer

02:18They're going to focus to the other priorities and making sure that none of these folks are staying behind

02:22Especially out on these little barrier islands like alligator point

02:26All right. We appreciate your reporting and be safe over the next 24 36 hours. Aaron rigsby

02:31We're going to be checking in with you quite a bit here throughout the course of hurricane. Helene closing in on the gulf coast of florida

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