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Hurricane Michael gains strength as Floridians flee to higher ground

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Hurricane Michael howled closer to Florida’s Gulf shore on Tuesday as a major Category 3 storm, as half a million coastal residents were urged to seek higher ground on the eve of a landfall forecast to bring towering waves and roof-shredding winds.

Michael is projected to plow into Florida’s Panhandle at midday on Wednesday, unleashing potentially devastating waves as high as 13 feet (4 meters) that could rush inland for miles around the storm’s centre, the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) warned.

By late Tuesday, Michael was causing major disruptions to U.S. oil-and-gas production as it churned north, gathering greater strength over warm Gulf of Mexico waters.

President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency for the entire state of Florida, freeing up federal assistance to supplement state and local disaster responses.

The last NHC report said the storm was about 200 miles (325 km) from shore and packing sustained winds of up to 125 miles per hour (205 km per hour), after jumping from a Category 2 to Category 3 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

Winds of that magnitude can inflict substantial damage to roofs and walls of even well-constructed homes, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters said the storm could also spawn tornadoes over parts of Florida and Georgia.

NHC Director Ken Graham said Michael represented a “textbook case” of a hurricane system growing stronger as it drew near shore, in contrast to Hurricane Florence, which struck North Carolina last month after weakening in a slow, halting approach.

Forecasts Tuesday night called for Michael to further intensify into a Category 4 storm, defined as a hurricane with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kph), before making landfall.

Hurricane-force winds extend about 40 miles from the centre, with tropical storm-force winds reaching 185 miles, Graham said.

The storm is likely to dump prodigious amounts of rain over Florida, Alabama and Georgia, as well as the Carolinas – still reeling from post-Florence flooding – and into Virginia. Up to a foot of rainfall (30 cm) is forecast for some areas.

“This is a storm that is going to be life-threatening in several ways,” said Bo Patterson, the mayor of Port St. Joe, Florida, whose small beachfront town lies directly in the storm’s projected path.

Florida Governor Rick Scott said Michael was expected to be “the most deadly, destructive storm to the Panhandle in decades.”

The region should brace for “major infrastructure damage,” specifically to electricity distribution, wastewater treatment systems and transportation networks, Jeff Byard, associate administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told reporters on a conference call.

Byard said an estimated 500,000 people were under evacuation orders and advisories in Florida, where residents and tourists were fleeing low-lying areas in at least 20 counties stretching along 200 miles (322 km) of shore in the Panhandle and adjacent Big Bend region.

Among them was Betty Early, 75, a retiree who joined about 300 fellow evacuees huddled on makeshift bedrolls of blankets and collapsed cardboard boxes at an elementary school converted into an American Red Cross shelter in Panama City, near the storm’s expected landfall.

 

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