Florida Panhandle pummeled by record-breaking Hurricane Michael

Michael, whose rapid intensification as it churned north over the Gulf of Mexico caught many by surprise, made landfall early in the afternoon near Mexico Beach, about 20 miles (32 km) southeast of Panama City in Florida’s Panhandle region, with top sustained winds reaching 155 miles per hour (249 kph).

The storm came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson wind scale. Its sustained winds were just 2 mph (3.2 kph) shy of an extremely rare Category 5.

As predicted, the storm’s intensity diminished steadily as it pushed inland and curled northeasterly into Georgia after dark. About eight hours after landfall, Michael was downgraded to a Category 1 storm, with top sustained winds of 90 mph (150 kph).

In the first apparent hurricane-related fatality reported, Gadsden County sheriff’s spokeswoman, Anglie Hightower, said a “male subject” was killed by a tree toppling onto his house in Greensboro.

Severe flooding, structural damage, uprooted trees and downed power lines appeared widespread in coastal areas near where the storm made landfall.

A video posted on Twitter showed winds ripping apart a house on Mexico Beach, its debris washing up to adjacent properties. Scott said there was a “lot of roof damage” in the storm’s path.

“My God, it’s scary. I didn’t expect all this,” said Bill Manning, 63, a grocery clerk who fled his camper van in Panama City for safer quarters in a hotel, only to see the electricity there go out.

At nightfall, the city was plunged into darkness, its flooded streets mostly silent and devoid of people or traffic.

Television news footage earlier in the day showed floodwaters up to the roofs of many homes in Mexico Beach. The fate of about 280 residents who authorities said defied evacuation orders was unknown.

Twenty miles to the south, floodwaters were more than 7-1/2 feet (2.3 meters) deep near Apalachicola, a town of about 2,300 residents, National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said. Wind damage was also widespread.

“There are so many downed power lines and trees that it’s almost impossible to get through the city,” Apalachicola Mayor Van Johnson said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said on Tuesday that an estimated 500,000 Florida residents had been ordered or urged to seek higher ground before the storm in 20 counties spanning a 200-mile (320-km) stretch of shoreline.

But Brad Kieserman of the American Red Cross said Wednesday that as many as 320,000 people on Florida’s Gulf Coast had disregarded mandatory or voluntary evacuation notices.

An estimated 6,000 evacuees took cover in emergency shelters, most of them in Florida, and that number was expected to swell to 20,000 across five states by week’s end, Kieserman said.

Bo Patterson, the mayor of Port St. Joe, just south of Mexico Beach, rode out the storm in his house seven blocks from the beach.

“It feels like you don’t know when the next tree is going to fall on top of you because its blowing so ferociously,” he said by telephone. “It’s very, very scary. We have trees being uprooted, heavy, heavy rain.”

Patterson was one of about 2,500 of the town’s 3,500 residents who ended up staying put, as many were caught off guard by the storm’s rapid escalation as it approached. “This happened so quickly,” he said.

FEMA head Brock Long acknowledged that early evacuation efforts in the area were slow, in comparison to how quickly the hurricane intensified. Michael grew from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane over the course of about 40 hours.

“Satellite images of Michael’s evolution on Tuesday night were, in a word, jaw-dropping,” wrote Bob Henson, a meteorologist with weather site Weather Underground.

With a low barometric pressure recorded at 919 millibars, the measure of a hurricane’s strength, Michael stood as the most powerful storm ever to hit Florida’s Panhandle.

Michael also ranked as the third-strongest storm on record to make landfall in the continental United States, after Hurricane Camille on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969 and the so-called Labor Day hurricane of 1935 in the Florida Keys.

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

At mid-afternoon, about 192,000 homes and business customers were already without power in Florida alone, with more outages reported in Georgia and Alabama, utility companies said.

About 3,500 Florida National Guard troops were deployed to assist with evacuations and storm recovery, along with more than 1,000 search-and-rescue personnel, Scott said.

NHC’s Graham warned that the storm would continue to pack tropical storm-force winds when it reached the Carolinas, still reeling from severe flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence last month. Up to a foot (30 cm) of rainfall was forecast for some areas from Michael.

Even before landfall, the hurricane disrupted energy operations in the Gulf, cutting crude oil production by more than 40 percent and natural gas output by nearly a third as offshore platforms were evacuated ahead of the storm’s arrival.