North Carolina’s in ‘bull’s-eye’
More than a million on the East Coast are told to evacuate as Florence strengthens.
ATLANTA — More than a million people were ordered to evacuate a huge stretch of the eastern U.S. coastline as Hurricane Florence rapidly intensified Monday into an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 hurricane packing 130-mph winds.
“We’re not going to gamble with the lives of the people of South Carolina,” the state’s governor, Henry McMaster, said in an afternoon press briefing Monday as he announced that eight counties along the state’s 187-mile coastline would begin to evacuate on Tuesday.
Mandatory evacuations have already begun on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
“The forecast places North Carolina in the bull’seye,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday. “When weather forecasters tell us life threatening, we know that it is serious .... We here in North Carolina are bracing for a hard hit.”
The center of Florence is expected to move over the southwestern Atlantic, between Bermuda and the Bahamas, over the next few days and bear down on the North Carolina and South Carolina coastlines on Thursday. Tropical-stormforce winds could reach the coastal Carolinas by Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
By midday Monday, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center upgraded Florence to a Category 4 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph. Just a few hours earlier, the center had raised Florence to a Category 3 as it moved about 1,240 miles eastsoutheast of Cape Fear, N.C., with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph.
President Trump, who received sharp criticism last year for his handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, took to Twitter on Monday to urge East Coast residents to seek safety.
“The Storms in the Atlantic are very dangerous,” Trump said. “We encourage anyone in the path of these storms to prepare themselves and to heed the warnings of State and Local officials. The Federal Government is closely monitoring and ready to assist. We are with you!”
In addition to a lifethreatening storm surge along portions of the coastlines of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, Florence is expected to bring exceptionally heavy rainfall, and flash flooding, as it slowly crawls over the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic.
People living inland should prepare for potential flooding and loss of power, officials warned.
“The takeaway here is this: … You’re going to get a staggering amount of rainfall,” Ken Graham, director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a Monday video presentation.
“If you think you’re safe because you’re away from the coast, that is not true. Well away from the coast — central portions of Virginia and central portions of North Carolina — you could be hundreds of miles away, several hundreds of miles in some cases away from the center, and you could still get those dangerous rains that are going to cause the flash flooding.”