Posted on 10/07/2016 12:52:15 PM PDT by Dave346
Hurricane Matthew battered the Florida coast today with powerful winds, potentially devastating storm surges and torrential rain, leaving over 1 million people without power as officials made last-minute appeals for any remaining holdouts to get out of harm's way.
Matthew also claimed its first U.S. victims after officials in St. Lucie County, Florida, said two people died overnight when emergency officials could not get to them because of the storm's strong winds.
One victim, a woman in her late 50s, died from cardiac arrest, according to St. Lucie fire department officials. Crews could not safely respond to her location and the woman died by the time crews arrived, officials said.
Later in the night, there was a report of an unconscious 82-year-old man breathing with difficulty. "When it was deemed safe for emergency vehicles to travel it was reported to first responders that the patient had been taken to the hospital," according to officials. The man was later declared dead.
The hurricane has already claimed hundreds of lives as it tore through Haiti and other Caribbean nations.
The National Hurricane Center downgraded the storm to a Category 3 hurricane with 120 mph winds at 2 a.m. ET today. The deadly storm could produce a potentially devastating storm surge of up to 10 feet over about 500 miles of coast that stretches from Florida, to Georgia and up into South Carolina.
As of 2 p.m. ET, Hurricane Matthew was 60 miles southeast of Jacksonville, Florida.
Severe flooding struck the beach in Jacksonville this afternoon, inundating the area with water and crushing dunes.
The storm is expected to move near or over the coast of northeast Florida and the coast of Georgia through tonight, then near or over the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
It may have fizzled on FLA but GA and SC stand to catch quite a flood of water. Those new Marines at Parris Island will get some lessons on community service.
Or it will turn north east. Rain is rain. It runs off. But for gosh sake do not leave your home unattended for looters
My daughter is a meteorology major, I asked her if the storm was being overhyped and she said yes.
The bridges are closed. The gates to the communities are shut and locked. Looters do not stand a chance of anything.
Of course you would need to see the Low Country to understand it.
Funny even so many freepers are helping the communist media lie and make this weak storm be out to be a Katrina all to take away our (freedom loving real Americans) last chance to take our country back form the communist oppressors, with Trump as our George Washington
That is a very condescending remark. That rain and wind can ruin peoples lives that I know. This isn't an event where you grab your umbrella or worry about your mascara getting smudged. We have a situation where major boats will capsize. Homes will be underwater. Not everyone will be safe because they need to be there.
Sounds like these two people died of natural causes, NOT from the hurricane. Like no one dies during the time of a hurricane? NOAA and Democrats are desperate to link ANY deaths to this dud of a storm that they purposely hyped as an electoral distraction to help Hillary.
A lot of Floridians haven’t forgotten Andrew.
Lot have forgotten ‘04.
You have got to be kidding me?
Give me one person that has drowned in their house defending their hard earned property from parasite looters? Just one!!
For those in the path of Hurricane Matthew, the National Hurricane Net on frequency 7.268 Mhz LSB is looking for damage reports from the affected area. Net Control callsign is KF5WDJ.
How I am to give you a list of people that have drowned because of a hurricane, let alone their intent for their presence?
Moron
That is useful info, thanks.
45mph winds are "risking their lives"?
How long ago did the models NOT show this thing making a big loop out in the Atlantic (which even now is uncertain)?
The forecasting is just not THAT accurate, and any East Coast Floridian with a brain knows this was the equivalent to being grazed by a bullet from a shaky-hand shooter.
(Haiti, of course, was awful, and we also have yet to see how bad the flooding will be in the Carolinas. Over on the Storm2k site (a great resource) some posters in the Carolinas are complaining that local media basically gave an "all clear" yesterday, and now they (Carolinas' coast) are getting inundated. Prayers should be up!)
Back in 2009, our local media and NWS, IMO, underwarned our area (mid South) about the approaching ice storm. NWS' forecast was actually very close as to amounts of ice, and where, and in advising of "catastrophic" damage to trees and the power grid, impassable roads, etc. But sufficient warning / advice from NWS and the media on what that meant (up to 3 weeks without power in some places, in a cold spell (esp. the 1st week) in February...) was not given. That caused a lot of grief, and surely some preventable deaths.
Again IMO, Gov. Scott played it right, this time.
I take it you have never done flood cleanup / reconstruction...
Some get it worse: Recently, in Baton Rouge, good friends of ours were trapped out on their roof, in very tough conditions, for many hours AND they lost virtually everything.
I’ve noticed several satellite radar images where there is no hurricane shown. Makes one wonder.
I would guess that flash flooding (or the potential) was the issue? It’s altogether too easy to die that way, esp. at night. We just had a recent case locally, where an entire family (including IIRC 2 young kids) died this way, as a 1st responder watched helplessly from a short distance away. (It was just one guy, on his cell phone to the family, and he could not reach the family’s vehicle as it was swept away. I cannot imagine...)
Matthew’s radar image was very impressive earlier. The satellite (visual) images were quite impressive, too. (I guess you missed it going up the FL / GA / southern SC coast.) It’s now run into shear and the structure partially collapsing — the problem being that such collapses cause a lot of the moisture to be precipitated, and it is coming down on the Carolina coast, which was already saturated, plus there is still a storm surge. Some rivers are already at all time record highs.
Typically, wind is not the primary danger in most hurricanes, if one is in a well built structure. (The highest winds are in a relatively small area, and most storms don’t get that strong, except in the often associated brief tornados, an even smaller area.)
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