Hurricane Michael bearing down on north Florida

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Michael roared down on the Florida Panhandle as a fast-strengthening major hurricane, gaining so much in unexpected fury that forecasters predicted it would become a Category 4 monster before it crashes later Wednesday against the region’s white-sand beaches, fishing villages and coastal communities.

The unexpected brute that quickly sprang from a weekend tropical depression grew swiftly, rising in days from a tropical storm to a Category 3 hurricane and then flirting with potentially catastrophic Category 4 power. Around midday it was expected to become one of the Panhandle’s worst hurricanes in memory with 125 mph winds and a lifethreatening storm surge of up to 13 feet.

Florida officials said roughly 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast had been urged or ordered to evacuate. Evacuations spanned 22 counties from the Florida Panhandle into north central Florida. But fears lingered that some failed to heed the calls to get out of Michael’s way as the hard-charging storm began speeding north over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Worried meteorologists said it had the potential of becoming one of the worst storms in the history of Florida’s Panhandle.

“I guess it’s the worst case scenario. I don’t think anyone would have experienced this in the Panhandle,” meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels. com told The Associated Press. “This is going to have structure-damaging winds along the coast and hurricane force winds inland.”

University of Georgia’s Marshall Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society, called it a “life-altering event” on Facebook and said he watched the storm’s growth on satellite images with a pit growing in his stomach.

Franklin County Sheriff A.J. Smith near the vulnerable coast said his deputies had gone door to door in some places urging people to evacuate. “We have done everything we can as far as getting the word out,” Smith said. “Hopefully more people will leave.”

More than 180,000 people of those leaving were under mandatory evacuation.