Hurricane Michael: Category 2 Storm Bears Down on Florida Panhandle

Hurricane Michael raced toward the Florida Panhandle on Tuesday, threatening to bring the ferocious rains and winds of a powerful tropical cyclone to the coast and hundreds of miles inland.

The storm is expected to make landfall over the Panhandle on Wednesday as a major hurricane, with wind speeds of at least 111 mph. Some counties have issued evacuation orders and shelters have been opened.

Beyond destructive winds, authorities said they feared torrential rains and perhaps 12 feet of storm surge. In an area that just two years earlier saw tremendous electrical disruptions from Hurricane Hermine, public officials and power companies face enormous pressure to keep the lights on or restore service quickly.

As of 8 a.m. Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center said the storm had strengthened to a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 100 mph and was moving north-northwest at 12 mph in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.

A hurricane warning was in effect from the Alabama-Florida border to the Suwannee River in Florida. A hurricane watch was in effect from the Alabama-Florida border to the Mississippi-Alabama border.

Hurricane Michael could make landfall as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday anywhere from Destin, Florida, to Apalachee Bay, the National Hurricane Center said. It was projected then to veer northeast — through Georgia and the Carolinas — before heading into the Atlantic on Thursday night.

President Donald Trump on Monday said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in full preparation mode. “It looked a couple of days ago like it was not going to be much,” he said of the storm, “and now it’s looking like it could be a very big one, so we’re prepared, and good luck.”

Gas, generators and other emergency supplies were reported sold out in many places, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida pleaded with residents Tuesday to heed evacuation orders and to prepare for a storm that he warned “could bring total devastation to parts of our state.”

“Hurricane Michael is a monstrous storm and the forecast keeps getting more dangerous,” Scott said during an appearance at the state’s emergency operations center in Tallahassee, the Florida capital.

By Tuesday morning, a handful of counties had issued evacuation orders that were often targeted at visitors or people who live in mobile homes or low-lying areas.

“If we need to have evacuations, local communities need to issue the orders now,” Scott said. “We cannot afford to wait.”

Scott, a Republican who is on the ballot next month for a U.S. Senate seat, has declared a state of emergency in 35 counties and deployed 2,000 members of the National Guard. He said he believed people were taking the storm “seriously,” but he also seemed to suggest that some local officials, familiar with the furies of triple-digit wind speeds and torrential rains, were perhaps not sufficiently fearful of Hurricane Michael’s perils.

“I think a lot of people have been through 110-mile-an-hour winds, they’ve been through 12 inches of rain,” he said. “I think what’s different about this storm that really concerns me is the storm surge.”

Weather forecasters, who have said storm surge could reach 12 feet in some areas, have issued a storm surge warning for the stretch between the border of Okaloosa and Walton counties to the Anclote River. A storm surge watch is in effect on both sides of the warning area: from the Okaloosa and Walton county line westward to Florida’s border with Alabama, and from the Anclote to Anna Maria Island.

On Tuesday, Scott offered an admonition to residents considering whether to flee, and he said that time was running short.

“If you’re on the fence, don’t think about it,” he said. “Do it.”

In many ways, climate change has made hurricanes worse: A rise in sea level is causing higher storm surges and warmer air is leading to rainier storms.

With Hurricane Michael, local geography also has a role to play in the storm’s impact.

If the predictions of its path hold, the hurricane will be the first to hit this area since Hurricane Hermine in 2016, said Jamie Rhome, a storm surge specialist at the National Hurricane Center. That storm was a Category 1. Hurricane Michael is expected to strike land as a Category 3, a major storm with wind speeds of 111 to 129 mph. That is enough to uproot trees and tear off roof decking.

Wind, while a source of destruction in storms, is not the only threat. Surge can devastate coastal communities, and the rain dumped by storms can cause flooding far inland. Rhome noted that while this hurricane’s path was still not certain, its probable impact at the bend of Florida on the way into the Panhandle could be very destructive.

“It’s an incredibly vulnerable spot,” he said. “Regardless of whether the track moves a little to the left or the right, or wobbles,” he said, “it’s going to be a bad storm surge event for somebody.” Rick Luettich, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina, said that the area was especially susceptible to a large storm surge because of its “funnel-shaped geometry and broad, shallow continental shelf.”

If there is good news, he said it is that the area of possible impact “is not as densely populated as other parts of the Gulf Coast, and therefore the human consequences of such a large surge should be less severe than if it hit further west on the Florida Panhandle or further east,” in say, Tampa.

Election offices that are closed Tuesday because of the hurricane will be able to accept paper voter registration applications on the day they reopen, whenever that might be, Secretary of State Ken Detzner said in a memo Monday night.

The close of voter registration had been scheduled for Tuesday, four weeks before Election Day in a state with some of the country’s marquee races, including contests for governor and a U.S. Senate seat.

But Detzner, a Republican who faced Democratic pressure to extend the deadline, effectively waived the deadline, writing that his decision would “ensure that each Supervisor of Elections Office has the same amount of days to register voters at their offices.”

The extension will not apply in all 35 counties for which Scott declared a state of emergency. Election offices in some of those counties, like Alachua, which includes Gainesville, and Hillsborough, which includes Tampa, were expected to be open for business Tuesday morning.

The deadline for online voter registration — 11:59 p.m. Tuesday — was unchanged.