Much of Florida Panhandle Left in Ruins after Hurricane Michael

Hurricane Michael raged through the Florida Panhandle into Georgia on Thursday as the most powerful storm to hit the continental United States in decades, turning homes into piles of lumber and verdant subdivisions into deep lagoons.

The storm made landfall near Mexico Beach, Florida, just shy of Category 5 strength Wednesday afternoon, but soon lost strength as it moved inland and was downgraded to a tropical storm at midnight. At 5 a.m. Thursday, Michael was about 30 miles west of Augusta, Georgia, heading northeast with sustained wind speeds of up to 50 mph.

It cut a quick path through the Panhandle, a corner of Alabama and southwest Georgia overnight, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without power and at least one person dead. The Carolinas, still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Florence last month, were bracing for impact Thursday.

Much of the coast of the Florida Panhandle, including Panama City, Florida, and Mexico Beach, near where the hurricane made landfall, was left in ruins. News reports and social media feeds were full of images of buildings shorn of roofs and houses reduced to splinters.

The hurricane is moving relatively quickly, at 21 mph, and is expected to speed up as it crosses into the Carolinas on Thursday and blows out to sea by early Friday.

A man died Wednesday after a tree crashed down on his home in Greensboro, northwest of Tallahassee, the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office said.

Michael took the nation by surprise, intensifying rapidly from a tropical storm to a major hurricane in just two days and leaving little time for preparations. It did so, scientists say, because of its low barometric pressure and of warmer-than-average water in the Gulf of Mexico.

As the hurricane pillaged a suburban neighborhood of Panama Beach called Cherokee Heights on Wednesday, Fatima Zogaj found herself trapped in a house that was falling down all around her, and all around her family.

Zogaj, 41, and her husband, Ahmed Alsaqqa, had not given much thought to whether they should hunker down at home ahead of the storm. They bought their blocky brick, six-bedroom house about three years ago, far from the coast and in a neighborhood of sturdy-looking brick houses of recent build.

“We didn’t expect it to be this bad,” Zogaj said late Wednesday, standing outside in a neighborhood of broken trees, flooded lawns and ripped roof tiles.

The couple, Zogaj’s mother and their four children encountered few problems in the storm’s first hour as the wind began to whip and howl. But soon the rain, blowing sideways, began leaking through the window of a guest bedroom on the second floor. Their roof tiles started to fly off.

Then the ceilings began collapsing in the second-story bedrooms, one after the other, disgorging huge, fluffy piles of pink insulation.

It covered nearly everything. It covered their teenage daughter, Salma, head to toe after her bedroom ceiling collapsed on her. It covered the fancy sectional sofa in their high-ceiling living room. They inhaled it and coughed.

But outside the wind was still blowing, and there was no leaving the house. They retreated into the corners of the house.

In the evening, they were thankful to be alive. But after telling their story, they were asked what would happen next, and they did not have an answer. They had no idea where they would sleep.

In a warming world, they say, hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: Warmer water provides more energy that feeds them.

Hurricanes and other extreme storms will also be wetter, for a simple reason: Warmer air holds more moisture.

And storm surges from hurricanes will be worse, for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the storms themselves: Sea levels are rising.

Researchers cannot say, however, that global warming is to blame for the specifics of the latest storm, Hurricane Michael, which grew to Category 4 with sustained winds of 155 mph, as it hit the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday. Such attribution may come later, when scientists compare the real-world storm to a fantasy-world computer simulation in which humans did not pump billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There are already tantalizing suggestions, however, that the warming caused by all those greenhouse-gas emissions has had an impact on Michael. A 2013 study showed that sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Gulf of Mexico have warmed over the past century by more than what would be expected from natural variability.

“That general region has been one where there has been long-term climate warming,” said Thomas R. Knutson, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study. “We have reason to believe humans have made the water warmer.”