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HomePeopleEvents'LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB': HURRICANE MICHAEL LEAVES TRAIL OF DEVASTATION

‘LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB’: HURRICANE MICHAEL LEAVES TRAIL OF DEVASTATION


Florida and Georgia count cost of one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit US as downgraded storm dumps rain on Carolinas
A waning but still powerful Hurricane Michael was lashing the Carolinas on Thursday after one of the strongest storms ever to strike the United States claimed at least two lives and tore a trail of carnage through Florida and Georgia.
Downgraded to a tropical storm, the cyclone that struck Florida’s Panhandle as a category 4 monster on Wednesday, with winds of 155mph, was dumping large quantities of rain on areas of South and North Carolina that are still recovering from the flooding of Hurricane Florence last month.
Daylight brought confirmation of Florida governor Rick Scott’s prediction that Michael, which inundated coastal towns with a storm surge of up to 14 feet from the Gulf of Mexico, would bring “unimaginable devastation”.
Television pictures showed that some residential waterfront communities had been obliterated. Street after street of houses and other buildings were ripped apart in Panama City, boats and warehouses in marinas were smashed into pieces, roofs were ripped from multiple structures in several other communities. Fallen trees and downed power lines were everywhere, with more than 900,000 homes and businesses without electricity in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina, according to poweroutage.us.
“It looks like an atomic bomb had hit our city,” resident David Barnes told the Panama City News Herald. “Damage has been widespread.”
Authorities confirmed at least two deaths. A man in Gadsden county, near the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, was killed when a tree fell on his house. An 11-year-old girl in Seminole county, Georgia, died after a mobile carport was picked up by the wind, crashed through the roof of the home where she was staying, and hit her on the head, the local emergency management agency director, Travis Brooks, told WALB.
In Mexico Beach, Florida, where Michael roared ashore at lunchtime on Wednesday with winds gusting to 175mph, there were reports that the small town of barely 1,000 was “just gone”. A CNN reporter looked down from a helicopter on whole streets flattened.
First responders were only just reaching the community on Thursday morning, and more helicopter footage showed national guard troops helping a handful of survivors.
A Mexico Beach town councillor, Rex Putnal, said he was anxiously awaiting news of residents who had defied evacuation orders and chosen to stay.
“Two hundred plus stayed in Mexico Beach to ride out the storm, and I know the people who stayed have done all they can to help everybody [but] I haven’t had any reports back from search and rescue,” he told CNN.
Michael crossed into Georgia late on Wednesday still as a category 3 hurricane with winds of 125mph. The storm spawned tornadoes, one of which damaged five houses in Roberta.
Governor Scott of Florida tried to reassure residents via Twitter that help was on the way. “We are going to be aggressive with rescue and recovery in the coming days and will do everything we can to assist our communities that have seen impacts from this devastating storm,” he wrote.
In another tweet he said the 19,000 workers the state had put on standby were already working to restore power.
Federal help was also being sent in. Brock Long, the administrator of the federal emergency management agency (Fema) said it would take some time to establish priority areas of need.
“There’s a lot of debris to get through to get the teams in and be able to assess damage,” he said. “Access to all the areas is one thing, search and rescue is where we are hyper-focused this morning,” he told CNN early on Thursday.
“This is what a category 4, borderline category 5 storm looks like, the worst of the storm surge, the worst of the wind and because it was strong it created a lot of damage far inland. It’s continuing to rush through South and North Carolina today.”
Van Johnson Sr, the mayor of Apalachicola, another waterfront community ravaged by the storm, said he was also trying to assess the extent of the damage. “There are so many downed power lines and trees that it’s almost impossible to get through the town,” he said.
Vance Beu, 29, was staying with his mother at her home in a complex of single-storey, wood-framed buildings, where they piled up mattresses for protection. A pine tree punched a hole in the roof and his ears popped when the atmospheric pressure fell. The roar of the winds, he said, sounded like a jet engine.
“It was terrifying, honestly. There was a lot of noise. We thought the windows were going to break at any time,” Beu said.
Michael was the most powerful storm to hit the US in more than 25 years, and the most powerful on record in the Florida Panhandle. It sprang quickly from a weekend tropical depression, going from a category 2 on Tuesday to a category 4 storm by the time it came ashore.
There have been isolated reports of looting. Congressman Neal Dunn said some arrests had been made in Bay county and the authorities had imposed a curfew.
Donald Trump has approved a major disaster declaration request for Florida, freeing federal resources for recovery efforts.
The cyclone triggered flash floods and mudslides earlier this week in mountain areas of western Cuba. Six people died in Honduras, four in Nicaragua and three in El Salvador.

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