FLORIDA ‘CATCHING SOME HELL’
Hurricane slams into Panhandle
Supercharged by abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle with terrifying winds of 250 kilometres per hour Wednesday, splintering homes and submerging neighbourhoods.
It was the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in nearly 50 years.
Its winds shrieking, the Category 4 storm crashed ashore in the early afternoon near Mexico Beach, a tourist town about midway along the Panhandle, a lightly populated, 300-kilometre stretch of white-sand beach resorts, fishing towns and military bases.
Michael battered the shoreline with sideways rain, powerful gusts and crashing waves, swamping streets and docks, flattening trees, shredding awnings and peeling away shingles. It also set off transformer explosions and knocked out power to more than 190,000 homes and businesses.
“We are catching some hell,” said Timothy Thomas, who rode out the storm with his wife in their second-floor apartment in Panama City Beach.
With the hurricane still pounding the state hours after it came ashore, and conditions too dangerous in places for search-and-rescue teams to go out, there were no immediate reports of any deaths or serious injuries.
Michael was a meteorological brute that sprang quickly from a weekend tropical depression, going from a Category 2 on Tuesday to a Category 4 by the time it came ashore. It was the most powerful hurricane on record to hit the Panhandle. “I’ve had to take antacids I’m so sick to my stomach today because of this impending catastrophe,” National Hurricane Center scientist Eric Blake tweeted as the storm — drawing energy from the unusually warm, 29 C Gulf waters — became more menacing.
More than 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast were urged to evacuate as Michael closed in. But the fast-moving, faststrengthening storm didn’t give people much time to prepare, and emergency authorities lamented that many ignored the warnings.
“While it might be their constitutional right to be an idiot, it’s not their right to endanger everyone else!” Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson tweeted.
Diane Farris, 57, and her son walked to a high school-turnedshelter near their home in Panama City to find about 1,100 people crammed into a space meant for about half as many.