Hurricane Sally batters Gulf coast with 'life-threatening floods' still expected
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Version 3 of 7. Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama pounded on Wednesday as officials warn of ‘tremendous operation’ of evacuating residents Hurricane Sally made landfall on the US Gulf coast early on Wednesday morning, with pounding rain and winds whipping above 100mph but with the huge category 2 storm system grinding along at just 2mph – a turtle’s walking pace – increasing the danger of flooding. It accelerated to 3mph and then 5mph into Wednesday afternoon as it battered the metropolitan areas of Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, encompassing nearly a million people. Emergency crews plucked people from flooded homes and coast guard helicopters buzzed the disaster zone looking for people in trouble. In Escambia county, which includes Pensacola, more than 40 were rescued within a single hour, including a family of four found in a tree, Sheriff David Morgan said. Entire communities will have to evacuate. “It’s going to be a tremendous operation over the next several days,” Morgan said. The storm tore loose a barge-mounted construction crane, which then smashed into the new Three Mile Bridge over Pensacola Bay, causing a section of the year-old span to collapse, authorities said. In downtown Pensacola, water rushed down some streets like river rapids, forming whitecaps as it slapped against buildings and rose above the tires on cars. Before sunrise, water was up to the doors of Jordan Muse’s car outside the Pensacola hotel where her family took shelter after fleeing their mobile home. The power failed early in the morning, making it too stuffy to sleep. Her eight-year-old son played with toys underneath the hotel room desk as Muse peered out the window, watching rain fly by in sheets. “The power trucks are the only ones above water, and they’re the biggest, Muse said, adding: “I can’t believe it got so bad.” Michele Lamar-Acuff woke to the thud of a small tree falling against a window of her Pensacola home. Waist-deep water gushed down her street. Above the loud whistling of the wind, she heard what sounded like transformers exploding. “I don’t feel safe to leave,” Lamar-Acuff said from the porch of a neighbor’s house. “I’m just staying put and hoping for the best.” Sally also tore away a large section of a newly renovated fishing pier at Alabama’s Gulf state park and knocked out power to more than a half-million homes and businesses across the region. By early afternoon, Sally had weakened into a tropical storm, with winds down to 70mph, but the worst may be yet come, with heavy rain expected into Thursday as the storm pushes inland over Alabama and into Georgia. Like the wildfires raging on the west coast, the onslaught of hurricanes this season has once again focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing slower, rainier, more powerful and more destructive storms. The slow-motion storm had exhausted residents in Alabama late Tuesday into Wednesday who listened through the night to tornado-warning sirens, phone alerts and howling winds, many frightened, sheltering but also sweltering indoors after power failures, as the storm approached. As the sun rose on battered Alabama and the Florida panhandle, torrential rain was hammering the coast and forecast to continue for up to 12 more hours in parts. The slowness also made the storm deceptively dangerous; while spinning in the Gulf of Mexico it gathered rain, which it then unleashed from Louisiana in the west to northern Florida in the east. Emergency authorities and weather services found a refrain as the storm approached, warning residents of “historic, life-threatening flooding”. “Torrential rains continue to batter the coast. Rainfall rates will get EVEN HIGHER when the eye wall of #Sally gets closer to the coast,” the National Weather Service posted to its Twitter account at 11pm. “CONDITIONS WILL GET WORSE.” Conditions did get worse overnight. Before landfall in Alabama, Sally dropped nearly 2ft of rain, spun off multiple tornadoes, and knocked out power at least 50 miles inland, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the dark. The damage unfolded so slowly, though, that sleepless coastal residents took to social media in exasperation, trading weather details and puns about Sally “slowing her Mustang down”. The storm’s eye wall, with winds topping 105mph, reached land near Gulf Shores, Alabama at 4.45am Wednesday local time. The storm pushed a surge of ocean water on to the coast. In Mobile Bay, just next to Gulf Shores, five rivers drain into the inlet and the authorities were warning of a potentially devastating flooding situation to come. Roofs have been ripped off houses, allowing the still-heavy rain directly into homes where people were trying to hunker down all day on Wednesday. In downtown Mobile, Alabama, a street light snapped, swinging wildly on its cable. Residents of nearby Orange Beach, Alabama, reported extensive damage and flooding. In daylight hours on Wednesday the water was swamping homes and trapping some people in high water. Nearly three feet of flooding covered streets in downtown Pensacola. “It’s not common that you start measuring rainfall in feet,” said a National Weather Service forecaster, David Eversole, in Mobile. “Sally’s moving so slowly, so it just keeps pounding and pounding and pounding the area with tropical rain and just powerful winds. It’s just a nightmare.” It was the second hurricane to hit the Gulf coast in less than three weeks and the latest blow in one of the busiest hurricane seasons ever recorded. At the start of the week, Sally was one of a record-tying five storms churning simultaneously in the Atlantic, strung out like charms on a bracelet. This for a storm that, during the weekend, appeared to be headed for New Orleans. Tate Reeves, Mississippi’s governor, urged people in the southern part of his state to prepare for flash flooding. As Sally tracks inland, more than 26 million people in the south and south-eastern US are under flash flood warnings or watches as Sally was forecast to bring heavy downpours to parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas later in the week. |