“An Atomic Bomb Has Hit Our City”: ‘Apocalyptic’ Post-Michael Scenes From Mexico Beach

by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Fri, 10/12/2018

If the nine-foot storm surge didn’t get them, the 150+ mph winds did.

As Michael, the third-most-powerful hurricane to ever make landfall in the Continental US, prepares to make its exit into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, many residents of the Florida panhandle are still in shock as those who fled try to return, and those who stayed recount watching in abject horror as their community was leveled by flood waters and wind during one of the most aggressive storms in US history. In interviews with reporters who managed the difficult journey to Mexico Beach to survey the damage, many residents struggled to choke back tears as they described how they watched in abject horror as the water and wind ripped homes from their foundations. Out of the chaos, many quickly realized that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s prophesy of “unimaginable devastation” had come to pass.

John Humphress, a storm chaser and drone pilot who spoke with the Associated Press about the damage, described the scene in Mexico Beach, Fla., what will be remembered as Hurricane Michael’s “ground zero”, in one word: “Apocalyptic.”

According to state officials, some 285 people in Mexico Beach refused to obey the mandatory evacuation order and thus obtained a front-row seat to the destruction from what some meteorologists have described as “the perfect storm.” While National Guard rescuers pushed into the storm zone on Thursday and rescued 20 survivors, the fate of dozens more remains unknown. FEMA Administration Brock Long put it best when he said the entire town of 1,100 had been “wiped out.”

First responders were forced to wait until after daylight on Thursday morning to access Mexico Beach as flooding from the storm had left it entirely cut off.’

Dawn Vickers, one of the rescued residents, said she had decided to sit out the storm with her daughter, mother and a friend who lived on a houseboat. At one point during the most violent phase of the storm, Vickers told the AP that she looked out a window and thought she saw a tree moving toward her house. But instead, her house was moving toward the tree.

>Dawn Vickers, her teenage son, and her mother, didn’t evacuate. They were joined during the storm by a friend who lived on a houseboat. At one particularly violent point in the storm, Vickers looked out the window and thought a tree was moving — but it was really her house, ripped off the foundation.

It was floating in the storm surge.

An Associated Press reporter found Vickers and her family sitting next to a convenience store with blown-out windows Thursday.

“Our house would have probably been in the canal if it hadn’t gotten caught on some trees that fell,” said 17-year-old Ryder Vickers, adding that the home split in two, like an egg.

Once the water receded, they climbed out a window, onto another house and over a boat, but because Dawn Vickers’ mother Patsy has a lung disease, they couldn’t go far. The four spent the night in one half of the waterlogged home.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” said Dawn Vickers. “We were all praying, ‘Just please get us through this.’ I thought we were going to die.”

While only 11 deaths from the storm have been confirmed (so far, at least), per the Washington Post, it’s widely expected that this number will rise as rescue workers sift through the wreckage. Two Mexico Beach residents who stayed told the AP about an elderly woman – the mother of a friend – who lived in a cinderblock home about 150 yards from the beach.

The Rest…HERE

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2018 at 11:21 am and is filed under Earth Changes, God Help Us, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.