Posted on 10/11/2018 6:04:20 AM PDT by advance_copy
Residents of the Florida Panhandle began taking in scenes of destruction Wednesday night, hours after Hurricane Michael slammed into the coast with a fury that ranked it among the most powerful storms ever to hit the United States.
“It’s all gone,” Deep Patel, 24, said as he stared at the remains of his duplex bedroom in Panama City, near where Michael made landfall as a Category 4 storm in the afternoon, packing winds of 155 mph. Most of the wooden rafters had been ripped off, exposing an upturned mattress. A bathtub landed a few houses away in a neighbor’s yard.
His mother, Hemlata Patel, sobbed as she picked up a bright red-and-gold sari from the grass, a white patent leather sandal from the street and a tangled pile of papers and clothes hanging from a stop sign.
“Is anyone hurt?” a police officer asked via loudspeaker as he passed in a cruiser. “Is everyone OK?”
The Patels nodded and the cruiser drove on.
Late in the day, authorities announced the launch of medical search-and-rescue missions and supply shipments across the region as officials sought to evaluate the extent of the devastation caused by the storm, which flooded coastal communities and unleashed winds that scoured cities dozens of miles inland.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Prayers up for everyone hit by this.
Just terrible.
This one seems to be one of those slam, bam thank you ma’am type of hurricanes, at least from a news cycle perspectives.
One day I hear about it and two days later it’s over.
“Florida is focused on search and rescue operations this morning...”
Praying for the folks and the rescue workers.
Michael is passing just south of us right now. At this point, it’s nothing more than a stiff breeze with showers.
Florida needs a different set of building codes.
We have concrete walls and roofs here. It makes the house more expensive too begin with but lowers maintenance and makes them basically typhoon/hurricane proof.
I only worry about the mango tree and plants in a typhoon, and I’ve sat through one with 155 mph winds
We have some of the strongest codes in the country. Unfortunately, the older homes were not built to those standards.
" Goes twice for the mobile homes. The area crushed by this storm is not, outside of the actual beach side parts of panama city and beach, not well to do areas. Most of those living there are basically eking out a living.
Guam has had some bad typhoons.
“Guam has had some bad typhoons.”
Luckily I was here when the big one blew through here in 2001.
I was here for the one in 2015 that had 160 mph winds decimated Saipan.
Hoping everyone and our FRiends are ok. Homes can be rebuilt.
Where is here?
My opinion — better buildings come AFTER a storm like this, since you have to rebuild anyway; the Panhandle has not apparently been hit for some time.
Looking at the pictures of some of the buildings that got destroyed (before/after), I couldn’t believe they even EXISTED along a beach, they were clearly going to be blown apart by even 100mph winds, and would be swept away by any big storm surge.
So now, they have to rebuild an entire beach town, and I suspect it will look like most of the other florida beach towns, concrete and steel and high-strength windows and basements with no critical equipment.
Bad, especially for people who didn’t have insurance, but better in the long run.
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