Hurricane Michael Leaves Swath of Ruin as It Slams Florida's Panhandle

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Hurricane Michael, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the continental United States, slammed into the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday, unleashing a trail of destruction across 200 miles that splintered houses, peeled off roofs and stirred up a terrifying surge of seawater that submerged entire neighborhoods and sent boats careening down city streets.

Michael, initially forecast to arrive as a tropical storm, instead amped up to furious intensity, hitting landfall just after midday near the small seaside community of Mexico Beach, 100 miles southwest of Tallahassee, with winds topping 155 mph.

Images from there showed swaths of shattered debris where houses once stood and structures inundated up to their rooftops; the streets of Panama City, farther west, were blocked by downed tree limbs and impossible tangles of power lines. Recreational vehicles, trucks and even trains were pushed over, surrounded by new lakes of water.

“Hurricane Michael is the worst storm that the Florida Panhandle has ever seen,” said Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, where 375,000 people were ordered evacuated from the western part of the state.

The storm was officially classified as a Category 4 — on the verge of Category 5 — but weakened as it continued its rapid advance up toward Georgia and the Carolinas, where cities still reeling from Hurricane Florence prepared for another onslaught of rain and wind. It was downgraded to a tropical storm at midnight Wednesday.

Just about every update seemed to bring greater grimness: closed bridges, more towering waves, suspended emergency services, admonitions that the time to evacuate had passed. The National Hurricane Center reported a 130-mph wind gust near the evacuated Tyndall Air Force Base — and said that the measuring instrument had then failed.

A man died in Greensboro, Florida, northwest of Tallahassee, after a tree crashed down on his home late Wednesday afternoon, local law enforcement officials confirmed.

But the full extent of the damage and other casualties was uncertain: Residents and emergency workers spent most of the day hunkered down and emerged only toward nightfall to begin assessing the storm’s toll. As dusk approached, though, the early outlines of a vast calamity were unfolding.

“You can’t drive a car anywhere, you can’t do anything because it’s littered with houses, pieces of houses,” said Patricia Mulligan, who rode out the storm with her family in a condo in Mexico Beach, a town of mom-and-pop shops and sport-fishing businesses about 35 miles southeast of Panama City. Outside, she said in a phone interview, she could see remnants of people’s lives strewn about: refrigerators, a beanbag chair, a washing machine, a kayak and a dresser.

Her brother, she said, lost a condo along the beach, and other nearby units were also destroyed. “They’re not there,” she said. “It’s gone.”

The ominous, unmistakable rhythm of a hurricane’s rains — drizzle, followed by unhinged gushing, and then drizzle again — unnerved the coast Wednesday morning hours before the fullest ravages began. And then the force of the hurricane tore through, cracking walls, toppling heavy metal fences and flattening cars with lampposts while people, unable or unwilling to evacuate, huddled in closets and stairwells. Entire counties seemed to rumble with the sounds of screeching winds that pushed rain sideways across streets. Lights flickered, and then they went dark.

The storm made landfall near Mexico Beach just before 1 p.m. with a storm surge that was recorded at 8 feet in one place along the Panhandle coast. A video shot there by Tessa Talarico, Mulligan’s daughter, showed a neighborhood submerged up to its rooftops, the debris of what once were homes and other structures drifting on the seawater’s swells.

A stronger hurricane had not hit the Panhandle in 167 years of record-keeping.

But the perils were farther reaching, with emergency declarations in effect for 322 counties across five Southern states. Warnings and watches — whether for hurricanes, tropical storms, storm surge or some brutish combination — were issued for as far west as Alabama’s border with Mississippi, and for the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas.

The storm is not expected to move offshore until Friday, having swept over much of Georgia as a hurricane and then North and South Carolina as a tropical storm.

Florida’s government said nearly 6,700 people were in 54 shelters and that close to 30,000 customers lost electricity before the storm’s landfall. A series of transformer explosions and other mishaps knocked out power to 388,000 homes and businesses, the governor’s office reported. The National Guard activated 3,500 troops, and the authorities said 1.5 million meals were ready to be distributed. Some 1 million gallons of water were also prepared.

“Unfortunately, this is a Gulf Coast hurricane of the worst kind because all of the elements associated with hurricanes come into play,” Brock Long, the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Wednesday after he briefed President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Trump, who is expected to visit the region as early as Sunday, said he would be “totally focused” on the storm but would not cancel a Wednesday night campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“All of America sends its unwavering love and support,” he said at the rally. “We will spare no effort, no expense, no resource to help these great fellow citizens of ours who are going through a tough time right now.” Clearly, the worst of the devastation is likely to be in the Panhandle, a region known more for its beaches, seaside towns and oyster harvests than as a target of a tropical cyclone.

The area has two nicknames: To the west, it is the Emerald Coast, named for the blue-green waters of the Gulf; to the east, it is the Forgotten Coast, intended to evoke the peaceful quiet of rural beaches. As the state’s economy has broadly flourished, parts of the Panhandle, once dependent on paper mills and the lumber industry, have struggled.

The storm came with tragic speed and unanticipated power after surfacing in the Western Caribbean as “potential tropical cyclone 14” on Saturday, 55 days before the end of the Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasters immediately predicted that the system would strike the Panhandle, probably on Wednesday afternoon as a tropical storm.

But as the cyclone approached and met the Gulf of Mexico, it grew more harrowing.

On Monday morning, the storm had winds of 70 mph, under the threshold of a hurricane. On Tuesday morning, wind speeds reached 110 mph, and at nightfall, forecasters believed they would go no higher than 129 mph.

But the storm intensified far more than unexpected overnight, and by sunrise Wednesday, the winds had reached 140 mph. Later they were even higher, reaching 155 mph — just 2 mph short of Category 5 strength — by landfall.

“The shear was high, so nobody expected it was going to intensify this rapidly,” said Haiyan Jiang, an associate professor at Florida International University who studies tropical cyclones.

The storm was the first major hurricane — a storm with winds of at least 111 mph — to make landfall in the continental United States since Hurricane Irma last year. That storm, which struck a different part of Florida, caused an estimated $50 billion in damage and was cited in 92 deaths.

The storm’s rapid intensification gave emergency officials and residents little time to prepare.

“When they started a couple of days ago and said it was going to be a Category 1, it was, like, ‘Cat 1, no big deal,'” Laurie Hamm said at the Panama City hotel where she had taken refuge a few miles from her town house nearer the beach. “When they said Cat 2, it was like, ‘Oh, maybe we’d better pay attention.’ And when they said Cat 3, it was like, ‘Oh, Lord.'” The rains had already started pounding Wednesday morning when people lined up in the cafeteria at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee to seek shelter. They carried grocery bags filled with snacks, bedding and the occasional pet.

Already, the room was busy with people trying to make the best of the storm that had driven them out of their homes in fear. They had watched how Hurricane Florence ravaged the Carolinas less than a month ago.

Betty Clark and Betty Tyler, friends who live in the same neighborhood of trailer homes, shared a table in front of a television as Tyler’s grandchildren flitted around the room.

“I’d rather be safe than foolish,” said Tyler, 73, who moved into the shelter Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, she laughed, “I was ready to go home.”

She was not sure when that would be.

Near the center of the room, Marco Sanchez and Lesley Padilla rested on three inflatable mattresses they bought Tuesday night at Walmart, after concluding that their trailer home might be unsafe for four young children.

“We left all our possessions and brought the most important ones: our papers and our children’s papers,” Sanchez said.

Their 2-month-old daughter, Meghan Sanchez, dozed in a baby carrier as her siblings, ranging from 3 to 11 years old, played games on tablets.

“The important thing is we’re all safe here,” Sanchez said. “Until the storm has passed.”