Did you hear the officer in the eye of the storm as he spoke to heraldo? He anticipated a beneficial scenerio in the timing of a wall-restructure. Does that make any sense to you? (I know nothing!)
Unfortunately landfalling in the middle of an ERC basically means converting a Cat 5 into a Cat 4 with a much wider radius of Cat 4 winds than you did when it was a Cat 5.
And it won't reduce the surge at all. A much wider area will suffer severe wind damage, but the amount of Biblically ridicously bad wind damage will be marginally reduced .