FAST-MOVING HURRICANE SET TO SLAM INTO FLORIDA
TALLAHASSEE, FLA. •At least 120,000 people along the Florida Panhandle were ordered to clear out on Tuesday as Hurricane Michael rapidly picked up steam in the Gulf of Mexico and closed in with winds of 175 km/h and a potential storm surge of almost four metres.
Coastal residents rushed to board up their homes and sandbag their properties against the fast-moving hurricane, which was expected to blow ashore around midday Wednesday along a relatively lightly populated stretch of shoreline known for its fishing villages and white-sand beaches.
The speed of the storm — Michael was moving north 19 km/h — gave people a dwindling number of hours to prepare or flee before being caught in damaging wind and rain.
“Guess what? That’s today,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said. “If they tell you to leave, you have to leave.”
As of 2 p.m. EDT, Michael had winds of 175 km/h, just below a Category 3 hurricane, and was getting stronger, drawing energy from warm Gulf waters.
The hurricane’s effects will be felt far from its eye.
Forecasters said Michael’s tropical storm-force winds stretched 600 kilometres across, with hurricanestrength winds extending up to 55 kilometres from the centre.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott warned that the “monstrous hurricane” was just hours away.
Forecasters said parts of Florida’s marshy, lightly populated Big Bend area — the crook of Florida’s elbow — could see up to 3.7 metres of storm surge.
Farther inland, in Tallahassee, the state’s capital, people rushed to fill their gas tanks and grab supplies. Many gas stations in Tallahassee had run out of fuel.
Michael could also dump up to a foot of rain over some Panhandle communities before it sweeps through the Southeast and goes back out to sea by way of the mid-Atlantic states over the next few days.
Forecasters said it could bring seven to 15 centimetres of rain to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, triggering flash flooding in a corner of the country still recovering from Hurricane Florence.
While Florence took five days between the time it turned into a hurricane and the moment it blew ashore in the Carolinas, Michael gave Florida what could amount to just two days’ notice. It developed into a hurricane on Monday.
Michael wasn’t quite done wreaking havoc in the Caribbean. In Cuba, it dumped almost 30 centimetres of rain in places, flooding fields, damaging roads, knocking out power and destroying some homes in the western province of Pinar del Rio. Cuban authorities said they evacuated about 400 people from low-lying areas.
Disaster agencies in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua reported 13 deaths as roofs collapsed and residents were carried away by swollen rivers.