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MIAMI — Tourists fleeing Miami in advance of Hurricane Irma faced long but orderly lines at Miami International Airport as airline workers tried to accommodate them on the remaining flights out.
The impending storm cut short the vacations of many visitors, including William Menegazzo, a 27-year-old physician from Porto Allegre, Brazil. He only managed to spend one night on South Beach before packing to leave.
“We arrived yesterday and we were planning to stay until Sunday,” said Menegazzo, who was standing in line at an American Airlines counter to try to catch a flight to Mexico.
Menegazzo, who stayed at the Pestana Miami South Beach, said with a wry smile that his one-night stay was “fantastic.”
Also hoping to catch a flight out were Mikko Koutaneimi and Heta Poikolainen, two tourists from northern Finland who were planning a two-week stay at the Grand Beach Hotel in Surfside. They headed for the airport after only a few days, however, as Irma’s predicted path began to overlap with Florida.
Koutaneimi said that the earliest Air France could guarantee their departure was Sunday, when the storm is expected to be at full force in Miami. They were queued up at American in hopes of getting a flight to New York with a return in a couple of days.
September is the trough of annual tourism in South Florida, but nonetheless there were 776,551 international air arrivals during the month last year and Miami’s 53,983 hotel rooms were 68.4% full, according to data from the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. An average of 1,121 flights a day depart Miami’s airport for 52 domestic and 98 international destinations.
The airport said that once sustained winds hit 55 miles an hour, the FAA control tower will close and flights suspended until the storm passes. That isn’t expected to happen until early Saturday.
Eli, a 42-year-old engineer from Montreal, had planned a week-long dive vacation in the Turks and Caicos but cut it short after only three days when Irma loomed on the horizon. He caught a flight to Miami only to face much the same predicament. “This thing keeps following me,” said Eli, who declined to give his last name.
Although he has a confirmed flight out of Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 7, Eli was at Miami International hoping to snag a standby fare to Montreal a day earlier. “I kept on saying, ‘Irma is not going to happen,'” he said.
Sоurсе: travelweekly.com