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Evacuees jam roads, fill local hotel rooms

Evacuees fleeing the path of Hurricane Matthew jammed roads, filled hotel rooms and in one case a life care center in Hendersonville.

"We've been sold out for days," said Kathy Kanupp, who manages five hotels in Henderson County. "The phone has not stopped ringing for three days. Everybody's coming up from Charleston. That's where they're evacuating."

Among the hotels in Kanupp's group is the Comfort Inn at the Asheville airport, which was already booked up for the weekend.

"There's a big horse show this weekend," she said. "So we've got this natural disaster on top of that. We were already busy on the weekend. Now the weekdays are full."

The Waverly Inn on North Main had a couple of vacant rooms Tuesday night and has sold out every night since, including through the weekend.

The guests "are mostly from South Carolina," said owner Mike Burnette. "I would say anywhere from Hilton Head to Myrtle Beach." He was getting a lot of calls from Charleston until today, when more calls started coming from Myrtle Beach. "I would say every single one of our visitors were coming from" hurricane threatened areas of South Carolina. "About a third were vacationing there and had to cut their vacation short. We've gotten one referral from an interstate hotel that was booked up. A lot of it's coming through the online travel agencies and we're getting a lot of direct calls. I would say it's a lot of people that haven't stayed here before."

Some of the guests came from assisted living centers. Life Care Center of Hendersonville took in 11 evacuees from Hurricane Matthew on Friday.

Life Care Centers of America, the center’s parent company, runs three skilled nursing and rehab centers in South Carolina, two of which were under the state’s mandatory evacuation orders. Life Care Center of Hendersonville is hosting 11 residents from Life Care Center of Charleston.

Life Care Center of Hendersonville, under the administration of Executive Director Thomas Hager, is one of five Life Care buildings taking in evacuees. Thirty-seven residents from Life Care Center of Hilton Head are staying at Life Care Center of Gwinnett in Lawrenceville, Ga., and 15 from Hilton Head were moved to Life Care Center of Lawrenceville, Ga. Life Care Center of Columbia, South Carolina, is hosting 77 residents from Charleston and four from Hilton Head, and Life Care Center of Blount County in Louisville, Tennessee, is hosting 13 evacuees from Charleston. This was the first time in Life Care’s history that it has evacuated residents across state lines.

Each evacuated resident has been placed in a room in his or her own bed, and facility staff has been communicating with families.

Life Care Center of Hendersonville, at 400 Thompson St., is one of two rehabilitation and skilled nursing centers in North Carolina operated or managed by Life Care Centers of America.