‘Don’t bet your life on riding out a monster’
‘Big and vicious’: hurricane Florence closes in on Carolinas
RALEIGH, N.C. — Motorists streamed inland on highways turned into one-way routes Tuesday as more than 1 million people in three states were ordered to get out of the way of hurricane Florence, a hair-raising storm taking dead aim at the Carolinas with 130 m.p.h. winds and potentially ruinous rains.
Florence was expected to blow ashore late Thursday or early Friday, then slow down and wring itself out for days, unloading 30 to 75 cm of rain that could cause flooding well inland and wreak environmental havoc by washing over industrial waste sites and hog farms.
Forecasters and politicians pleaded with the public to take the warnings seriously and minced no words in describing the threat.
“This storm is a monster. It’s big and it’s vicious. It is an extremely, dangerous, life-threatening, historic hurricane,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said.
He added: “The waves and the wind this storm may bring is nothing like you’ve ever seen. Even if you’ve ridden out storms before, this one is different. Don’t bet your life on riding out a monster.”
North and South Carolina and Virginia ordered mass evacuations along the coast. But getting out of harm’s way could prove difficult.
Florence is so wide that a lifethreatening storm surge was being pushed 300 miles ahead of its eye, and a swath of states from South Carolina to Ohio and Pennsylvania could get deluged.
People across the region rushed to buy bottled water and other supplies, board up their homes or just get out of town.
A line of heavy traffic moved away from the coast on Interstate 40, the main thoroughfare between the port city of Wilmington and inland Raleigh.
Between the two cities, about two hours apart, the traffic flowed smoothly in places and became gridlocked in others because of fender-benders.
Only a trickle of vehicles was going in the opposite direction, including pickup trucks stocked with plywood and other building materials.
Service stations started running out of gas as far west as Raleigh, with bright yellow bags, signs or rags placed over the pumps to show they were out of order.
At 2 p.m., the storm was centred 845 miles (1,360 km) southeast of Cape Fear, North Carolina, moving at 17 m.p.h. (28 km/h). It was a potentially catastrophic Category 4 storm but was expected to keep drawing energy from the warm water and intensify to near Category 5, which means winds of 157 m.p.h. (253 km/h) or higher.
“This one really scares me,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham warned.
Forecasters said parts of North Carolina could get 20 inches of rain, if not more, with as much as 10 inches elsewhere in the state and in Virginia, parts of Maryland and Washington, D.C.
One trusted computer model, the European simulation, predicted more than 1.3 metres in parts of North Carolina. A year ago, people would have laughed off such a forecast, but the European model was accurate in predicting 1.5 metres of rain for hurricane Harvey in the Houston area, so “you start to wonder what these models know that we don’t,” said University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy.
Multiple feet of rain is “looking likely,” he said.
On Parris Island, South Carolina, recruits were ordered evacuated from the Marine Corps’ biggest training installation on the East Coast.
Florence could slam the Carolinas harder than any hurricane since Hazel, which hit in 1954. The Category 4 storm destroyed 15,000 buildings and killed 19 people in North Carolina.