How does Hurricane Matthew compare to other storms?

The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Haiti on Tuesday with top sustained winds near 145 miles per hour.

People watch from both sides of the La Digue river as water roars past where the Petit Goave bridge once stood, destroyed by Hurricane Matthew, in Petit Goave, Haiti, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2016.

“When a hurricane is forecast to take a track roughly parallel to a coastline, as Matthew is forecast to do.it becomes very hard to estimate impacts this far in advance”, the hurricane center said.

It’s too soon to say with certainty whether Matthew will make landfall in the United States.

As of tomorrow, Thursday- it will have been 4,000 days since the USA has had landfall from a major hurricane (Category 3 or stronger).

The path of Hurricane Matthew will likely parallel at least a segment of the East Coast, instead of making landfall. It should weaken somewhat as it moves north, but it would still pack a significant punch. Chuckling – because meteorologists have a dark sense of humor about storms – both Masters and McNoldy acknowledge that one trusted computer model even sees a possible loop-de-loop that curls Matthew back around to South Florida for a second time.

“What we know is that many, many houses have been damaged”, Haitian Interior Minister François Anick Joseph said.

Now, Florida and SC are bracing for the worst, with mass evacuations, CBS2’s Andrea Grymes reported.

The North Carolina emergency declaration covered 66 counties in parts of eastern and central North Carolina.

How it compares to Matthew: So far, the biggest similarities between Hurricane David and Hurricane Matthew are the tracks both storms took through the Caribbean.

The latest estimated track shows the category 3 hurricane turning east into the Atlantic after it reaches North Carolina, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Forecasters expect the storm to strengthen a bit over the next few days.

The storm is packing top sustained winds of 125 miles per hour (205 kph) and is moving to the north at 10 miles per hour (17 kph) with some strengthening is forecast in coming days. Matthew has made it through the region without much weakening.

While residents and tourists in the Bahamas braced for the hurricane, which was expected to make landfall there Wednesday afternoon, millions of people in the US were urged to evacuate the southeastern coast before the hurricane is expected to hit there sometime between Thursday evening and Saturday.