VIDEO: A Tampa Family Finds Shelter At A Columbus Hotel

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – Car after car in the parking lot at The Holiday Inn Express in Columbus, had Florida license plates.

Nearly all rooms at the Columbus hotel are booked and more than half are filled with Hurricane Irma evacuees, including this family from the Tampa Bay area.

“It was either Tennessee or here. We knew it was going to come up towards Georgia, the Carolina’s area, so it was here or Tennessee, and then we, you know, I didn’t want to take the chance of it veering to Tennessee, so this was probably the safest place, and you know, we’re glad we came here,” says Damien Serrano.

What would usually have been a ten hour drive to The Friendly City, turned into a twenty hour journey.

They waited almost six hours to get gas at one of their pit stops.

This isn’t their first time to deal with a hurricane, but it is their first time to evacuate to Mississippi.

“In 2005, we went through the hurricane in Orlando, which many people didn’t take serious, including myself then, I was young, and seeing obviously what the destruction had did then, and that only was a category 2, so knowing that this was going to be a 4 or a 5, I didn’t want to take a chance with my little girls.”

The father worried Hurricane Irma would leave her mark on their home.

“I think it’s okay, the neighbors checked in on it, but in our neighborhood it floods tremendously, like I said, in regular rain, it floods in our area bad, you know, Florida is working on it from what I understand, but just in that Tampa Bay area everything just floods on a regular tropical storm, let alone a hurricane.”

The family will head back home later on this week.

Once they get there, power will be the next concern, not only at home, but also at Damien’s job at a medical transportation company.

“We have a lot of regular patients and clients that we take to and from dialysis places. So, if these places don’t have power for dialysis, including the hospitals, the hospitals can only take so many dialysis patients, or so many chemo, or radiation patients, so the destruction goes far and beyond houses and so on and so forth, you’re talking about millions of elderly who need medical help.”

Some of the other hotel guests came from Miami and other parts of Florida.