‘Don’t play games with it’
Forecasters warn monstrous storm could hesitate offshore, punishing larger area
Communities along the Southeastern coast buttoned up against the onslaught of Hurricane Florence as forecasters Wednesday warned that the monster storm could hesitate just offshore for days — punishing a longer stretch of coastline harder than previously feared —before pushing inland over the weekend.
In a videotaped message from the White House, President Donald Trump said the government is fully prepared for Florence but urged people to “get out of its way.”
“Don’t play games with it. It’s a big one,” he said.
The National Hurricane Center’s projected track had Florence hovering off the southern North Carolina coast from Thursday night until landfall Saturday morning or so, about a day later than previously expected. The track also shifted somewhat south and west, throwing Georgia into peril as Florence moves inland.
The overall trend is “exceptionally bad news,” said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy, since it “smears a landfall out over hundreds of miles of coastline, most notably the storm surge.”
Waves 83 feet high were measured near the eye of Florence, according to a tweet from the National Hurricane Center. But that was out in the open ocean, where deeper water means bigger waves.
“This is not going to be a glancing blow,” warned Jeff Byard, an administrator with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency. “This is going to be a Mike Tyson punch to the Carolina coast.”
As of Tuesday, about 1.7 million people in North and South Carolina and Virginia were under warnings to evacuate the coast, and hurricane watches and warnings extended across an area with about 5.4 million residents. Cars and trucks full of
people and belongings streamed inland.
If some of the computer projections hold, “it’s going to come roaring up to the coast Thursday night and say, ‘I’m not sure I really want to do this, and I’ll just take a tour of the coast and decide where I want to go inland,”’ said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private Weather Underground forecasting
service.
Florence could strengthen some over open water and then weaken as it nears land, but the difference won’t make it any less dangerous, forecaster Stacy Stewart wrote in a National Hurricane Center discussion.
For many of those under evacuation orders, getting out of harm’s way has proved difficult, as airlines cancelled flights and
motorists had a hard time finding gas.
Florence is the most dangerous of three tropical systems in the Atlantic. Tropical Storm Isaac was expected to pass south of Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, while Hurricane Helene was moving northward away from land. Forecasters also were tracking two other disturbances.