Chaos as hurricane families ignore 'stay away' warnings

Thousands of residents desperate to return home after fleeing Hurricane Frances have ignored Florida’s plea to stay put, jamming main roads, delaying emergency workers and causing tempers to flare in the sticky heat.

One man was so desperate for ice that he shot the lock off a freezer. Fights broke out in some places, drivers waited for hours to fill up their fuel tanks and more than 1,000 cars coiled around several blocks in Stuart as a distribution centre watched over by National Guardsmen offered water, ice and ready-to-eat meals.

“Everyone’s hot, everyone’s sweating so much at night that nobody can sleep. Everyone’s tossing and turning. The kids keep crying. I can’t take no more of this. Nobody can take this,” said Maria Sanchez, 26, who waited more than 90 minutes with her four children to get supplies in Stuart, about 35 miles north of West Palm Beach.

While many began removing debris, clearing downed trees and mopping up the water in their homes, weary Floridians looked over their shoulder at another hurricane several days away in the Atlantic.

Hurricane Ivan could become the third hurricane to hit the state this year, though it was too soon to determine the storm’s exact path. The storm made a direct hit on Grenada yesterday, thrashing concrete homes into piles of rubble and uprooting trees and power poles.

“It almost seems like we’ve got a ‘kick me’ sign on the state here,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami.

As many Floridians went home for the first time since Frances battered the state on Sunday, traffic on parts of Interstate 95, the major highway along the Atlantic coast, was double the usual levels in some areas. Federal Emergency Management Agency workers trying to reach Martin County on the south east coast got stuck in traffic.

About three million Floridians were told it could take up to a week to restore power to all of them, with the longest wait for Daytona Beach. That was bad news with high humidity and temperatures hovering around 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius).

“None of the stores have anything that you need. There is no bread to be found, no ice or water. I’m lucky I got gas this morning,” Serafina Ferreira said at a relief site in West Palm Beach, where lines stretched for miles.

Palm Beach County officials reported at least 300 arrests, estimating about 75% were for breaking the curfew.

Frances hit a wide swath of Florida’s east coast early on Sunday with winds of 105mph and more than 13ins of rain, ripping off roofs and flooding streets up to 4ft deep. It weakened into a tropical storm before sweeping into the Panhandle on Monday, causing little damage there.

The storm’s remnants dumped heavy rain in Georgia and Alabama, yesterday, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands and closing schools, while several tornadoes were reported in the Carolinas. The storm and its remnants were blamed for at least 19 deaths in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, in addition to two earlier in the Bahamas.