PIX: Hurricane Florence From Space

“Don’t plan to leave once the winds and rains start”.

For many of those under evacuation orders, getting out of harms way has proved difficult, as airlines canceled flights and motorists had a hard time finding gas.

Town Manager Mike Cramer said law enforcement officers will try to assess how many people are still on the island immediately south of Wilmington. If you do, move to a higher ground before the storm arrives. “Flooding is nearly guaranteed”.

The storm’s maximum sustained winds were clocked late on Wednesday at 110 miles per hour (175 kph), down from a peak of 140 mph a day earlier, before it was downgraded to a Category 3, then a Category 2, on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of wind strength.

Hurricane Florence is now expected to head more directly west after making landfall, crossing through SC.

Hurricane Florence was on course Wednesday, September 12, to deliver a powerful blow to the east coast of the United States, with forecasters warning of life-threatening rainfall and flooding even as it weakened to a Category 2 storm.

However, Brian McNoddy, a senior research associate at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, warned: “This could be an unprecedented disaster for North Carolina”.

The Post reports that the storm could cause the sea level to rise by 9 feet at its peak and heavy winds have the potential to take down trees and damage property.

By late Thursday into Friday, steering patterns in the atmosphere may completely break down causing the storm to stall just off the coast of southeast North Carolina and northeast SC.

While the hurricane is expected to weaken as it begins to interact with land before making landfall, Florence will remain a risky major hurricane as it approaches the East Coast, officials said.

About 1.7 million residents have been urged to flee from parts of North and SC.

At this height of the Atlantic hurricane season, Florence was being trailed on east-to-west paths by two other storms, Hurricane Helene and Tropical Storm Isaac, but neither packs the deadly punch of Florence. “It’s one of those situations where you’re going to get heavy rain, catastrophic, life-threatening storm surge, and also the winds”.

If the hurricane continues in a southwesterly direction, the Georgia coastline and inland counties will experience the outer bands of the storm, meteorologists said.

As Florence closed in, some residents weighed whether to ride it out. Yet some of the big wildcards are how much Florence will hit Charlotte and the Washington, D.C. area.

In Wilmington, Richard King, 64, said Wednesday that he, his wife and perhaps 60 of their neighbors planned to stay.