As the monstrous, category five Hurricane Dorian bears down on the Eastern seaboard, evacuations began taking place over the weekend, and it includes Palm Beach County, Florida, the home of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
The evacuation orders took effect on Sunday afternoon, as Palm Beach County and Martin County were both divided into zones. The order affected roughly 215,000 residents of both counties, according to state emergency director Jared Moskowitz.
Mar-a-Lago was included in Zone B, which consisted mostly of the county’s waterfront property.
According to the Miami Herald , all Mar-a-Lago employees, aside from security personnel, were sent home from the resort until the historically dangerous storm passed through. The club is closed to guests until October due to the off-season.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell was criticized earlier this week after posting a since-deleted tweet that she was “rooting for a direct hit” on Trump’s Florida resort. She apologized and posted another tweet that hammered Trump on denying climate change, suggesting that such a powerful hurricane might change his mind.
“Well, we will see if Mrs. Post’s design can stand up to the assault! I know Palm Beach well and am sorry if it gets a big hit. I wish I cd believe that it wd shake up Trump’s climate change denial! Only today his admin has removed regs to limit methane- a worse GHG than CO2!” Campbell tweeted Thursday.
According to the Tampa Bay Times , U.S. Secret Service personnel refused to elaborate on any security measures taken at what’s popularly known as Trump’s “Winter White House.” They directed any questions of that nature to the resort.
It’s not the first time evacuations were ordered at the luxurious Florida resort. In 2017, guests were forced to leave due to the threat of Hurricane Irma.
BREAKING: Mandatory evacuation ordered in Palm Beach, Martin counties includes Mar-a-Lago. #HurricaneDorian https://t.co/jThEeG1LO3
— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) September 1, 2019
Trump has also claimed that he received $17 million in insurance payouts after the resort sustained damage during the highly-active 2005 hurricane season, although the Associated Press debunked the claim, finding little evidence that the resort was seriously damaged.
Trump has spent the last several days tweeting about the approaching storm, which is due to affect the United States within the next few days. Aside from retweeting several different forecasts of the hurricane by various media outlets and meteorologists, Trump warned residents of several states in the projected path of the dangers of the storm.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , Trump also mistakenly warned residents of Alabama, which the National Weather Service said was inaccurate. MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi made that clear in a Sunday tweet .
“Trump says Alabama is one of the states that will ‘get a bit of a beat down’ from Dorian. There are no models at all that show Dorian affecting Alabama. At all,” Velshi wrote.
