Florence charges toward Carolinas with ‘potential for unbelievable damage’

Most intense storm to strike the region in at least 25 years

Category 4 Hurricane Florence is less than 48 hours away from making landfall on the Southeast coast with catastrophic impacts, from damaging winds to flash flooding to widespread power outages.

The storm’s surge, the rise in sea water above normally dry land at the coast, could be over nine feet at peak. Hurricane-force winds will bring down trees and damage homes and businesses. Like Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Florence is expected to slow significantly when it reaches the coast, allowing the storm to dump a catastrophic amount of rain in the Carolinas.

Florence will be, in all likelihood, the most intense storm to strike the region in at least 25 years, since Hugo.

“This will likely be the storm of a lifetime for portions of the Carolina coast,” the National Weather Service in Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote Tuesday, “and that’s saying a lot given the impacts we’ve seen from hurricanes Diana, Hugo, Fran, Bonnie, Floyd, and Matthew.”

Forecasts project the center of Florence to make landfall around the South and North Carolina border on Friday as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

As it nears the coast, the storm’s forward motion will slow to a crawl, but the winds and rain will continue full-strength.

Since Tuesday, forecasts have shifted the storm track toward the south and southwest after it reaches the coast, which could increase the storm’s severity in coastal South Carolina through Myrtle Beach and Charleston and even into parts of Georgia.

Due to unusual steering patterns in the atmosphere, Florence may crawl southward down the Southeast coast, the opposite direction storms usually travel.

The National Hurricane Center is warning of a triple threat in the Carolinas:

A “life-threatening storm surge” at the coast – a tsunami-like rise in ocean water over normally dry land;

“Life-threatening freshwater flooding from a prolonged and exceptionally heavy rainfall event” from the coast to interior sections; and

“Damaging hurricaneforce winds” at the coast and some distance inland.

Like Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over Texas in 2017, Florence could linger over the Southeast for several days after landfall, unloading 15 to 25 inches of rain and isolated amounts of up to 40 inches. Flooding from heavy rains is the second-leading cause of fatalities in tropical storms and hurricanes that make landfall.

Enough rain could fall to break North Carolina’s record for a tropical storm – 24 inches – set near Wilmington during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations at the Weather Service’s national prediction center.

More than 1.5 million people have been ordered to evacuate coastal areas ahead of the storm because of both destructive winds and a storm surge that could place normally dry land under at least 10 feet of water.

“All interests from South Carolina into the Mid-atlantic region should ensure they have their hurricane plan in place and follow any advice given by local officials,” the Hurricane Center said.

“North Carolina, my message is clear,” a grim Gov. Roy Cooper said at a briefing Wednesday. “Disaster is at the doorstep and is coming in.”

Federal officials warned that the millions of people in Florence’s sights could be without electricity for weeks, if high winds down power lines and massive rainfall floods equipment. There are 16 nuclear reactors in the region, and crews at the one closest to where landfall is forecast readied the station, at Brunswick, for a shutdown.

The monstrous storm has forced the closing of hundreds of schools throughout the region. Because Florence’s rainfall is expected to pound areas far from the coast, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke and North Carolina State universities canceled classes through week’s end. Boeing and Volvo shut down their Charleston factories, idling thousands who build 787s and sedans.

President Donald Trump has approved emergency disaster declarations for the Carolinas and Virginia, which frees up funds for relief and recovery. “We’re as ready as anybody has ever been,” he said after a briefing with Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator William “Brock” Long and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.