LAKELAND — At four times the size of Hurricane Andrew, weather forecasters were calling Hurricane Floyd the biggest storm yet to threaten the United States mainland.

An estimated two million residents along Florida’s east coast evacuated their homes for safer areas, and shelters in Central Florida’s Orange County area housed 4,000 residents alone, the most ever in shelters there, according to local news reports.

United Methodists were among those heading out.

Nearly 60 percent of members of Mims United Methodist Church in the Florida Conference’s Melbourne District evacuated, according to the Rev. David Harris, Mims’ pastor.

"We called all members and know where everyone is," Harris said early Sept. 14. "A good number are leaving."

Harris said many of the church’s members live in mobile homes and left them after mandatory evacuations of mobile home parks, barrier islands and low-lying areas were issued.

Mims is in Brevard County five miles north of the city of Titusville and one of the places the storm was expected to hit hardest. "We’re on the hump of the state," Harris said. "Probably in the worst of it."

Harris said streets were bare, stores were closed and there was "almost not a car out there."

Mims member and trustees chair Bill Touchton was one member who joined residents leaving for higher and drier ground. He, his wife and 16-year-old daughter headed to Sanford that Tuesday morning to ride out the storm at a hotel there.

"I just happened to be in Miami for work three months after Hurricane Andrew. I know they’re [hurricanes] nothing to fool around with," Touchton said. "Those who didn’t get to see it just don’t understand."

Touchton said they decided to leave Sunday night and were prepared. He said, in fact, that he and his family are always prepared, especially after making it through wildfires that devastated the area around his home and other parts of the state last year.

"The fires came within a mile of us," he said. "We were ready to run if it came to that."

Despite Floyd’s threat, Touchton said he was calm about the storm and evacuating. "You’ve gotta’ be calm about it. There’s nothing you can do about it, but get out of the way," he said. "You leave the rest in the Lord’s hands."

Members of at least eight United Methodist churches in the DeLand District, which includes the Daytona Beach and Palm Coast areas, also evacuated, according to Martha Gay Duncan of that district’s office.

She said spirits were good, however, and members were lending a hand to neighbors. The Rev. Neil Lacy and a group of men from First United Methodist Church, New Smyrna Beach, went house to house late Monday night before the storm’s expected hit helping residents secure their homes with plywood.

DeLand District Superintendent Mont Duncan delivered $200 worth of snack-type food to a shelter at the DeLand fairgrounds at the request of the emergency management office.