Battered U.S. coast assesses damage
RESCUERS SEARCH FOR THOSE WHO STAYED BEHIND WHEN HURRICANE STRUCK
The small Gulf Coast community of Mexico Beach was known as a slice of Old Florida.
Now it lies in splinters.
Hit head-on by hurricane Michael, numerous homes in this resort town of about 1,190 people were shattered or ripped from their foundations. Boats were tossed like toys. Entire blocks of homes near the beach were obliterated, reduced to nothing but concrete slabs in the sand.
What the 2.7-metre storm surge didn’t destroy, the 250 km/h winds finished off.
Now, rescuers and residents are struggling to get into the groundzero town to assess the damage and search for the 285 people believed to have stayed behind.
At least six deaths were blamed on Michael, the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in more than 50 years, and it wasn’t done yet: Though reduced to a tropical storm, it brought flash flooding to North Carolina and Virginia Thursday, soaking areas still recovering from hurricane Florence. It was expected to blow out to sea by early Friday
Gov. Rick Scott said the Panhandle woke up to “unimaginable destruction.”
“So many lives have been changed forever. So many families have lost everything,” he said.
A man outside Tallahassee was killed by a falling tree, and an 11-year-old girl in Georgia died when the winds picked up a carport and dropped it on her home. One of the carport’s legs punctured the roof and hit her in the head. A driver in North Carolina was killed when a tree fell on his car.
The full extent of Michael’s fury was only slowly becoming clear, with some of the hardest-hit areas difficult to reach because of roads blocked by debris or water. More than one million homes and businesses in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas were without power.
Some of the worst damage was in Mexico Beach, Fla., where the hurricane crashed ashore Wednesday as a Category 4 monster.
The resort town is on the west end of what is sometimes called Florida’s Forgotten Coast, so named because it is not heavily developed like many of the state’s other shoreline areas.
Drone footage showed a stunning landscape of devastation. Few structures were unscathed.
Mishelle McPherson and her ex-husband looked for the elderly mother of a friend on Thursday. The woman lived in a small cinder block house metres from the Gulf and thought she would be OK.
Her home was reduced to crumbled blocks and pieces of floor tile.
“Aggy! Aggy!” McPherson yelled. The only sound that came back was the echo from the half-demolished building and the pounding of the surf.
“Do you think her body would be here? Do you think it would have floated away?” she asked.
A National Guard team went into the area and found 20 survivors overnight, and more crews were pushing into the stricken zone on Thursday. The fate of many other residents was unknown.
The Coast Guard said it rescued at least 27 people before and after the hurricane came ashore, mostly from homes along the Florida coastline.
Among those brought to safety were nine people rescued by helicopter from a bathroom of their home in hard-hit Panama City after their roof collapsed.
On Thursday, residents who evacuated tried to return. The Florida governor pleaded with them not to. “I know you just want to go home. You want to check on things and begin the recovery process,” Scott said. But “we have to make sure things are safe.”
In Panama City, most homes were still standing, but no property was left undamaged. Downed power lines lay nearly everywhere.
Roofs had been peeled off and carried away. Aluminum siding was shredded to ribbons. Homes were split open by fallen trees.
The Tyndall Air Force Base endured punishing winds and took intense rain, causing structural damage and closing it until further notice. The 600 families who live on the base were offered space in local shelters.
In nearby Panama City Beach, Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford reported widespread looting of homes and businesses. He imposed a curfew and asked for 50 members of the National Guard for protection.
As the storm made its way inland, it caused havoc in Georgia, spinning off possible tornadoes and taking down power lines and trees. Forecasters said it could drop up to 18 centimetres of rain over the Carolinas and Virginia before pushing out to sea.
In North Carolina’s mountains, motorists had to be rescued from cars trapped by high water. Tens of thousands had lost power, at least 16 roads were closed, dozens of school systems shuttered and three rivers were poised for moderate or major flooding, authorities said.
“For North Carolina, Michael isn’t as bad as Florence, but it adds unwelcome insult to injury, so we must be on alert,” Gov. Roy Cooper said.
The White House said Trump declared a major disaster in Florida, while FEMA said that he had signed an emergency declaration for Georgia.