Hurricane Michael Hammers the Panhandle

Packing winds of close to Category 5 strength, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle Wednesday as a strong Category 4 storm, destroying buildings, closing roads, cutting power to 800,000 people, and continuing its path of destruction across Georgia to bring heavy rains on Thursday to the Carolinas, already dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Florence’s record flooding.

Winds at the storms center pulverized the Panhandle town of Mexico Beach, obliterating some homes. A CNN crew flying over the scene in a helicopter at daybreak said, “It’s gone. It’s gone.”

“Mexico Beach took the brunt,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long said at a morning briefing. “That’s probably ground zero.”

CNN’s @BrookeBCNN is in a helicopter flying over Mexico Beach, Florida, getting a look at one of the hardest hit areas from Hurricane Michael: “It’s gone… it’s obliterated… I’ve never seen anything like this… I have no words” https://t.co/sFUNF4n8aS pic.twitter.com/lPpgc0IsWw

— CNN (@CNN) October 11, 2018

The storm’s rapid intensification surprised forecasters, and left Panhandle residents scrambling to evacuate or find shelter. “For a tropical storm or hurricane to rapidly intensify, it needs three key ingredients: low wind shear, warm ocean water and high humidity,” explained Scientific American (see: “Why Did Hurricane Michael Rev Up to Category 4 So Quickly?” by Andrea Thompson). “All three of these ingredients were present with Michael—an unusual situation for this time of year, this far north in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Video courtesy of Philippe Papin on Twitter

“Hurricane Michael took millions of residents by surprise, intensifying from a tropical storm to a major hurricane in just two days and leaving little time for preparations,” reported The New York Times (see: “Hurricane Michael Intensified Quickly, Taking Many by Surprise,” by John Schwartz). “Hurricane Michael’s sharp increase in strength as it approached Florida was due in part to its low barometric pressure, said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist in the atmospheric science department at Colorado State University.”

As the earth’s climate warms, this sort of rapid intensification will be more likely, according to weather expert Dr. Jeff Masters (see: “Dangerous Rapidly Intensifying Landfalling Hurricanes Like Michael and Harvey May Grow More Common,” by Dr. Jeff Masters). Writing on the Weather Underground’s Category 6 blog, Masters said: “In a 2016 paper, “Will Global Warming Make Hurricane Forecasting More Difficult?” (available here from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel explained that not only will global warming make the strongest hurricanes stronger, it will also increase how fast they intensify. Troublingly, intensification rates don’t increase linearly as the intensity of a storm increases–they increase by the square power of the intensity. Thus, we can expect future hurricanes to intensify at unprecedented rates, and the ones that happen to perform their rapid intensification just before landfall will be extremely dangerous.”

By the weekend, a picture of total devastation was coming into focus. “It’s like the end of the world,” one shocked resident of Mexico Beach told the Washington Post (see video: ” ‘It’s like the end of the world’: Hurricane Michael leaves a town in ruins“).

Relief operations were ramping up, but facing a dauntingly massive task, reported The New York Times (see: ‘We Need Answers’: Hurricane Michael Leaves Florida Residents Desperate for Aid,” by Richard Fausset, Audra D. S. Burch and Alan Blinder). “It would take time to reach everyone,” the Times reported. “Yet the Panama City area, one of those hit hardest by Hurricane Michael, grew into a whirring hive of activity on Friday, as box trucks, military personnel, and rescue and aid workers flowed in from surrounding counties and states, struggling to fix communications and electrical systems that officials said were almost totally demolished.”