“This Really Scares Me”: Hurricane Florence Turns South; Nuclear Plants To Shut Down
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 09/12/2018
Hurricane Florence is closing in on the Southeast as officials warned more than 1 million people in its projected path to leave now or face disaster. Florence is a category four hurricane with sustained winds of 130 mph, and computer models on Wednesday morning show it will make landfall around Wilmington, North Carolina on Friday as a major hurricane, said National Hurricane Center (NHC).
Florence is expected to be one of the strongest hurricanes on the eastern seaboard in decades and could unleash dangerous storm surges, flooding and hurricane-force winds in the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic states.
According to reports, Florence’s track to the U.S. East Coast shifted slightly to the south overnight and the storm is now threatening to batter a wide swath of coastline as it makes landfall near Myrtle Beach.
“With the new track, you’re just exposing more shoreline to worse conditions,” said Evan Duffey, an AccuWeather meteorologist. “If Florence rides southward, as now forecast, it means its strongest side will rake the shore, threatening property from South Carolina to Virginia.”
While Florence which is still 530 miles (855 kilometers) away from the coast, is expected to lose wind speed the closer it gets to land, it remains a formidable threat to the coastline from Georgetown, South Carolina, to Wilmington, North Carolina as peak winds could be between 100 and 120 miles per hour. While the storm will likely weaken further in the coming hours – and history is full of storms that lost power before striking land and are still counted as among the most infamous, Katrina, Ike and Sandy are just three – Bloomberg notes that they all stand as proof that ranking on the Saffir-Simpson windscale alone isn’t a measure of power.
“People worry about the winds on the Simpson scale,’’ Myers said. “But wind is on average the third cause of damage from a hurricane. First is flooding from heavy rain, then damage along the coast from the sea. They are focused on the wrong thing.’’
Unlike Hurricane Hazel, which made landfall near the North Carolina-South Carolina border in 1954 and quickly moved through the region, Florence is coming straight on and will stick around for days, AccuWeather’s Myers said. He said the storm is bigger than average, and pegs the potential costs at $30 billion.
In preparation for Florence, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler approved emergency fuel waiver requests on Tuesday as “extreme and unusual fuel supply circumstances exist in portions” of the Carolinas. The waiver will remain effective through Sept. 15 to help ensure a decent supply of gasoline.
According CBS, the coastal surge from Florence could leave the eastern tip of North Carolina under more than 9 feet of water in spots, projections showed.
As we reproted before, the Navy, Air Force and Army were moving ships and aircraft out of harm’s way. Thousands of Marines and their families evacuated from Camp Lejeune, leaving the rest to dig in ahead of what could be a direct hit.
“This one really scares me,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham told CBS.
“This storm is going to knock out power days into weeks. It’s going to destroy infrastructure. It’s going to destroy homes,” said Jeff Byard, an official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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