Central Pa. hotels booked to capacity, unable to accommodate many guests ... - Patriot-News
You can tell by the license plates.
Throughout the parking lots of nearly every Harrisburg hotel, you'll see from where they fled — Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Virginia — parked under a brooding gray sky.
Some were here for the Carlisle Corvettes show Saturday, but others came to get away from Hurricane Irene.
And Tara Betz ran out of places to send them.
The general manager of the Comfort Inn Riverfront Hotel in Harrisburg had to start diverting hundreds of families hoping to escape the storm to other hotels. But what Betz would find out was that every hotel in Harrisburg had reached capacity by early Saturday.
The Comfort Inn reached capacity around 2 p.m. Friday. Operating a four-line switchboard, front desk associates received 60 to 75 calls an hour until 9 p.m. Friday.
In her 25 years of hotel experience, Betz had never seen so many people try to check in so quickly.
"They're all running from Irene," said Betz, who called 20 other Harrisburg hotels asking for available vacancies.
There weren't any.
Betz then started sending escapees to two Carlisle hotels: a Rodeway Inn and a Days Inn.
Sharon Almalem got lucky.
The 34-year-old Queens, N.Y., resident grabbed a room for her family with the help of friends — four families with children — who all checked into the Holiday Inn Express off the Wertzville Road exit of Interstate 81 in Hampden Twp. on Saturday morning.
Almalem would have stayed home with her husband and two children if not for the news reports about the hurricane.
"We started seeing it all over the news and on the Internet, and friends started talking," said Almalem, who moved to Queens from Israel eight years ago. "They said everyone is running away from Irene."
So the Almalems ran, too.
Her husband, David, said the family plans to return to Queens on Wednesday if it's safe.
It was a "no-lose" situation, Almalem said.
"We were getting ready to take a vacation," she said. "We got to get away and keep our lives away from danger at the same time."
Standing in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Hampden Twp., Chris Watson chuckled.
Watson is here on business from Barbados, a Caribbean island that's often a target for hurricanes.
His thought on the prospect of the midstate getting 3 to 4 inches of rain overnight?
"This is nothing," said Watson, an environmental standards inspector. "We get 3 to 4 inches of rain in one hour [on Barbados]."
Maurice Douglas might have been caught off guard, but he can't deny Irene's affect on Harrisburg's economy.
"We can say we saw it coming," said Douglas, a front desk associate at the Holiday Inn. "We didn't think it'd be this big."
It's not very often that Douglas sees so many people from so many different places.
"We get a big hurricane like this once every 10 years it seems," Douglas said, "but nothing big enough to send people here like this."
Just outside, Almalem and her husband sat on a park bench, as their children — a 2-year-old boy and 3-year-old girl — ran up and down the sidewalk.
And then a drizzle started falling.
"It hasn't started," Almalem said. "I'd rather be here when it does."
28 Aug, 2011--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNG6p3LUHpC_JWJgtgteST1oboYtHA&url=http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/08/most_harrisburg_hotels_booked.html
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