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Article snippet: ORLANDO, Fla. — Bracing for hurricanes is almost a summer tradition here: the steady, clanking sound of wood banged to windows, the endless lines for bottled water and fuel, the pilgrimages to fortified shelters. But Irma, which struck Florida’s coastline twice and then tore through the state with a fury, is anything but a run-of-the-mill hurricane. It was wider than the peninsula itself. There was hardly anywhere in the state to escape its blustery wrath. Certainly not in the tiny islands of the Keys, which found themselves nearly under water on Sunday after Irma zeroed in on Cudjoe Key, Fla., just after 9 a.m. Not in the shimmering high-rises of Miami, where hurricane winds partially knocked down two construction cranes. Not in and around the tourist havens of Orlando and Tampa, where theme parks were shuttered. Even the most northern pockets in Tallahassee, the capital, and the small towns along the Florida-Georgia line, were cowering with the rest of the state for a thorough pummeling from tropical-force winds. To try to escape Irma, Floridians scattered across the state on clogged interstates. They slept on cots inside high schools, on narrow beds in roadside motels, on friends’ couches and wherever they could reach on a tank of gas. The question for everyone was whether to go, and then where to go, to best outlast the winds. Irma’s ruinous march was, for a while, aimed directly at South Florida, prompting much of the population, with memories of Hurricane A... Link to the full article to read more