Hospitality, hard feelings and ‘hooligan element’ as evacuees flooded midstate in ’99

The mayor of Macon opened his home to a family of strangers.

A woman from Florida, fleeing the threatening storm, handed out roses. It was her way of saying thank you to folks in small towns as she journeyed to safety through rural Georgia.

Students from the Savannah College of Art and Design turned an evacuation shelter in Macon into a two-day slumber party. They watched The Weather Channel and played cards. One student named her stuffed teddy bear after the hurricane — Floyd.

But all wasn’t hunker-down hunky-dory around here in September 1999.

As Hurricane Floyd swirled up the East Coast — in the end only skirting Georgia — some 2 million evacuees from South Carolina to Florida ventured inland to higher ground. Thousands stopped in the midstate.

A few, it turned out, didn’t much care for it.

With highways and back roads from the coast clogged and motels packed, some of the displaced took cover at shelters in Vidalia, Dublin, Macon and Perry.

An estimated 2,600 people stayed at the recently opened Wilson Convention Centre, but there wasn’t enough room so locals were encouraged to invite people into their homes. Hundreds of Maconites did just that. Mayor Jim Marshall welcomed in a family with three small children, the Osgoods from Savannah.

James Golden took in another Savannah family, serving them muffins and coffee for breakfast while Regis and Kathie Lee played on a TV in the background.

“Everybody’s nerves are on end,” Golden told a newspaper reporter back then. “You don’t know who these people are. You just have to trust the Lord.”

Meanwhile, tensions ran high at the shelter in Perry.

Floyd refugees were put up at the Georgia National Fairgrounds & Agricenter.

The venue had been expecting upward of 10,000 soldiers from Fort Stewart, but they never showed.

Instead, on a middle-of-the-night caravan of buses, about 3,000 Savannah residents arrived.

Among them were some two dozen just-freed inmates from the Chatham County jail.

There was plenty of food and water, but there weren’t enough cots to go around. The military throng that the fairgrounds had been expecting were going to bring their own sleeping gear.

The civilians, however, did not. Many, about 150 in all, arrived ill and in need of treatment at area hospitals. Some were dehydrated.

The scene was for the most part orderly enough until the all-clear was given for coastal residents to return home.

Even so, while the refugees were in town, as The Telegraph reported at the time:

Tempers flared. Some Savannah residents complained about being sheltered in buildings used for livestock shows.

A pair of evacuees were arrested for trespassing. Two were locked up for burglary. Another was cited for public drunkenness.

As the crowd boarded buses home, some people shouted cuss words at Perry officials. Shelter volunteers reported being threatened.

When they were gone, Perry blamed Savannah for not telling its leaders the refugees were coming in the first place. Savannah blamed Perry for being unprepared.

Police from across the region helped keep the peace.

Then-Perry Police Chief George Potter said, “We wanted to protect the refugees from the hooligan element in their own crowd.”

Up in Macon, there wasn’t much trouble to speak of.

But as Interstate 16 reopened and the masses headed east, one Red Cross official watched the exodus and seemed relieved, having survived what she said were “some chaotic days.”

This story was originally published October 6, 2016 at 4:26 PM with the headline "Hospitality, hard feelings and ‘hooligan element’ as evacuees flooded midstate in ’99."