MIAMI/PORT-AU-PRINCE: Hurricane Matthew, carrying winds of 120 miles per hour, lashed Florida on Friday and cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes as it hugged the state’s Atlantic coast on a northward track after killing hundreds of people in Haiti.
Matthew, the first major hurricane to threaten a direct hit on the United States in more than a decade, triggered mass evacuations along the coast from Florida through Georgia and into South Carolina and North Carolina.
“The winds are ferocious right now,” said Jeff Piotrowski, a 40-year-old storm chaser from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was near Cape Canaveral early on Friday. “It’s fierce.”
The storm downed power lines and trees and destroyed billboards in Cape Canaveral, he said.
NASA and the US Air Force, which operate the Cape Canaveral launch site, had taken steps to safeguard personnel and equipment. A team of 116 employees was bunkered down inside Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center to ride out the hurricane.
Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told media he was concerned that relatively light damage in southern parts of the state could give people further north a false sense of security.
“People should not be looking at the damages they’re seeing and saying this storm is not that bad,” Fugate told NBC. Fugate also said people should be aware the hurricane carried more than just ferocious winds.
“The real danger still is storm surge, particularly in northern Florida and southern Georgia. These are very vulnerable areas. They’ve never seen this kind of damage potential since the late 1800s.”
Speaking on NBC’s “Today” program, Fugate said few people were really prepared for the storm’s effects and that while it was too late for some to move to safer ground, those who could still evacuate now should do so, unless they were in areas affected by hurricane-force winds.
“It’s still a very dangerous situation.”
About 300,000 Florida households were without power, local media reported. In West Palm Beach, street lights and houses went dark and Interstate 95 was empty as the storm rolled through the community of 100,000 people.
The number of people killed by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti rose to at least 478 people on Friday, as information trickled in from remote areas previously cut off by the storm, officials said.
With the numbers rising quickly, different government agencies and committees differed on the total death toll. A Reuters tally of deaths reported by civil protection officials at a local level confirmed 478 had died.
Haiti’s central civil protection agency, which takes longer to collate numbers, said 271 people died because of the storm. Some 61,500 remain in shelters, the agency said.
Officials say some 3,000 people have already checked into shelters in Florida.
According to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, 48 shelters are already providing refuge for 3,015 people in Florida. Another 13 special needs shelters are already housing 31 people.
The shelters are all in schools in areas where evacuations — either mandatory or voluntary — are underway. The Florida counties include Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, St. Lucie, Glades, Martin, Duval and Brevard.
Special needs shelters are designed to aid people with disabilities. Shelters are listed at floridadisaster.org.
Matthew, the first major hurricane to threaten a direct hit on the United States in more than a decade, triggered mass evacuations along the coast from Florida through Georgia and into South Carolina and North Carolina.
“The winds are ferocious right now,” said Jeff Piotrowski, a 40-year-old storm chaser from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was near Cape Canaveral early on Friday. “It’s fierce.”
The storm downed power lines and trees and destroyed billboards in Cape Canaveral, he said.
NASA and the US Air Force, which operate the Cape Canaveral launch site, had taken steps to safeguard personnel and equipment. A team of 116 employees was bunkered down inside Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center to ride out the hurricane.
Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told media he was concerned that relatively light damage in southern parts of the state could give people further north a false sense of security.
“People should not be looking at the damages they’re seeing and saying this storm is not that bad,” Fugate told NBC. Fugate also said people should be aware the hurricane carried more than just ferocious winds.
“The real danger still is storm surge, particularly in northern Florida and southern Georgia. These are very vulnerable areas. They’ve never seen this kind of damage potential since the late 1800s.”
Speaking on NBC’s “Today” program, Fugate said few people were really prepared for the storm’s effects and that while it was too late for some to move to safer ground, those who could still evacuate now should do so, unless they were in areas affected by hurricane-force winds.
“It’s still a very dangerous situation.”
About 300,000 Florida households were without power, local media reported. In West Palm Beach, street lights and houses went dark and Interstate 95 was empty as the storm rolled through the community of 100,000 people.
The number of people killed by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti rose to at least 478 people on Friday, as information trickled in from remote areas previously cut off by the storm, officials said.
With the numbers rising quickly, different government agencies and committees differed on the total death toll. A Reuters tally of deaths reported by civil protection officials at a local level confirmed 478 had died.
Haiti’s central civil protection agency, which takes longer to collate numbers, said 271 people died because of the storm. Some 61,500 remain in shelters, the agency said.
Officials say some 3,000 people have already checked into shelters in Florida.
According to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, 48 shelters are already providing refuge for 3,015 people in Florida. Another 13 special needs shelters are already housing 31 people.
The shelters are all in schools in areas where evacuations — either mandatory or voluntary — are underway. The Florida counties include Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, St. Lucie, Glades, Martin, Duval and Brevard.
Special needs shelters are designed to aid people with disabilities. Shelters are listed at floridadisaster.org.
