SALLY SMASHES STATES
SHELLSHOCKED US residents are cleaning up after Hurricane Sally left a trail of destruction in coastal towns from Alabama to the top of the Florida panhandle.
Sally, which made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane, turned streets into rivers, toppled trees and downed powerlines.
“The whole house was shaking like a boat on the water. It was scary, man, it really was,” said Matt Wilson of Orange Beach, Alabama, one of the worst-hit towns with at least one death.
Some of the worst reported flooding was in Pensacola, Florida, where downtown streets resembled lakes at the height of the storm with cars submerged to the tops of their wheels and ferocious winds whipping up whitecaps.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was to visit Pensacola to survey the damage, which included a missing section of a major new bridge across Pensacola Bay.
Mr Wilson said his family fled their home at the height of the storm.
“Everything on the ground floor is gone,” he told WPMI.
“We ended up leaving the house during the eye of the storm … and waded through about five foot of water to our neighbour’s house, arm in arm.”
The unusually heavy flooding was attributed to the slowmoving storm, which lingered over the coast for hours.
Many Florida residents were caught off guard when Sally veered sharply east and came in for a direct hit, including Jeff Gardner, whose family “found ourselves inside the hurricane”.
“You just sit there wondering if, you know, your house is about to start to be ripped apart,” he said.
There have been so many tropical storms in the Atlantic this year the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation, is about to run out of names for only the second time ever.