‘It’s a monster’: 1.7 million flee US hurricane
US AUTHORITIES ordered up to 1.7 million people to flee the path of Hurricane Florence.
Residents of several eastern states scrambled to leave as the category four storm, with winds of 225kmh, approached.
“This storm is a monster. It’s big and it’s vicious. It is an extremely dangerous, life-threatening, historic hurricane,” said Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, as he warned people not to gamble lives on riding out the storm.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter to issue his own warning.
“Please be prepared, be careful and be SAFE,” he wrote.
US AUTHORITIES have ordered up to 1.7 million people to flee the path of Hurricane Florence.
Across several eastern states, residents scrambled to leave as the Category 4 storm, with winds of 225kmh, approached.
“This storm is a monster. It’s big and it’s vicious. It is an extremely dangerous, life-threatening, historic hurricane,” said Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, as he warned people not to gamble their lives on riding out the storm.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter to issue his own warning.
“Please be prepared, be careful and be SAFE,” he wrote.
Mr Trump was later briefed in the Oval Office in front of TV cameras by Brock Long, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
The president said: “The safety of American people is my absolute highest priority. We are totally prepared. We are ready. We’re as ready as anybody’s ever been.”
Mr Long said the hurricane would be a “devastating event” and urged Americans to evacuate if they’ve been asked to leave their homes.
He said electric power could be out for weeks.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster ordered as many as one million residents of the state’s eastern coast to leave their homes ahead of the storm’s predicted arrival today.
Schools in 26 of the state’s 46 counties were closed from Tuesday.
The governor of neighbouring North Carolina ordered an evacuation of the Outer Banks, barrier islands that are a popular tourist destination, and parts of coastal Dare County, while a state of emergency was declared in Virginia.
“This is a very dangerous hurricane,” Mr McMaster said, adding that the evacuation order for coastal counties was “mandatory, not voluntary”.
“We do not want to risk one South Carolina life in this hurricane,” the governor told reporters. “We’re liable to have a whole lot of flooding.”
Hours later, Mr Trump approved emergency declarations for both coastal states, a move allowing the release of federal funds and equipment to help protection and recovery efforts.
The US president said he had spoken to governors of threatened states, adding that the “federal government stands by, ready to assist 24/7”.
Hurricane Florence has the potential to bring catastrophic flooding to areas of the eastern United States already soaked by heavy rain and it may be the strongest storm to hit the region in decades.
A Category 4 on the fivelevel Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, Florence was 750km south-southeast of Bermuda and the centre of the hurricane was forecast to pass between Bermuda and the Bahamas yesterday, the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said.
Forecasters expected some strengthening in the next 36 hours, as Florence marched
in the next 36 hours, as Florence marched west-northwest at around 20kmh.
At a hardware shop in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, store manager John Johnson said the rush on batteries, flashlights, plastic tarps and sandbags began on Friday.
“From eight o’clock until two we were slammed,” said Johnson, who sold scores of bags of sand over the weekend, saving just a few to barricade the store’s own doors. “We were non-stop.”
Nurse Barbara Mack was using a small shovel to fill sandbags at a public works facility in Charleston, but she saw a silver lining in the hurricane preparations.
“This is probably the only exercise I get this week,” she said.
Also out for sandbags was Deborah LaRoche.
Half her supply was going to barricade a basement soup kitchen she manages and the other half was going to protect her own home on nearby Johns Island.
She and her husband were yet to decide on whether or not to evacuate their family of two children and a dog, said
Ms LaRoche.
Having grown up in stormprone Florida, she said she is careful not to underestimate any hurricane.“It doesn’t matter what happened in [previous] storms,” said Ms LaRoche, a social services director. “This one is different.”
On its current track, Florence is expected to hit the Carolinas and Virginia the hardest, the NHS said.
“Don’t concentrate on the exact forecast track of Hurricane Florence,” the National Weather Service warned.