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Hurricane Sally made landfall near the Florida-Alabama line, US on Wednesday (local time) with winds of 105 mph (168.98 km / h) and rain measured in feet, not inches, flooding homes and trapping people at high tide as it slid inland by what could be a long, slow, disastrous rain through the Deep South.
Moving at an agonizing 3 mph (4.83 km / h), or as fast as a person can walk, the storm made landfall at 4.45 a.m. near Gulf Shores, Alabama, hitting the Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida metropolitan areas, which have a combined population of nearly 1 million.
It launched boats ashore or sank them on the dock, crushed palm trees, took off roofs, knocked down billboards and cut power to more than half a million homes and businesses. A replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, La Niña, was missing from the Pensacola boardwalk, police said.
Sally released a barge-mounted construction crane, when it then crashed into the new Three Mile Bridge over Pensacola Bay, causing a section of the year-long span to collapse, authorities said. The storm also washed away a large section of a recently renovated fishing pier in Alabama’s Gulf State Park.
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Emergency crews removed people from flooded houses. In Escambia County, which includes Pensacola, more than 40 were rescued in a single hour, including a family of four that was found in a tree, Sheriff David Morgan said.
Gerald Herbert / AP
Hurricane Sally made landfall on Wednesday near Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a Category 2 storm, pushing a surge of ocean water onto shore and dumping torrential rain that meteorologists say would cause dangerous flooding from the Florida Panhandle to Mississippi and inland in the next few days. .
By early afternoon, Sally had weakened into a tropical storm, with winds of up to 110 kilometers per hour (70 mph), but the worst could be yet to come, and heavy rains are expected through Thursday through as the storm moves inland over Alabama and Georgia. For much of the day, it was moving at just 5 mph (7 kph), concentrating the amount of rain falling anywhere.
Morgan estimated that thousands more will have to flee the rising waters in the coming days. County officials urged residents to rely on texting to communicate with family and friends in order to keep cell phone service open for emergency calls.
“There are entire communities that we are going to have to evacuate,” the sheriff said. “It is going to be a tremendous operation for the next few days.”
Gerald Herbert / AP
A man watches the flooding in downtown Pensacola, Florida.
West of Pensacola, the power poles tipped midway in Perdido Key, Florida, when Joe Mirable arrived at his real estate business and found the two-story building vandalized, its contents scattered on the ground. While digging through the ruins, Mirable pointed to a folder labeled “Hurricane Action Plan.”
“I think the professionals were wrong,” he said before the wind blew his hat away.
More than 2 feet of rain (61 centimeters) were recorded near Naval Air Station Pensacola, and nearly 3 feet (0.91 meters) of water-covered streets in downtown Pensacola, the National Weather Service reported.
Gerald Herbert / AP
People play in a flooded parking lot in Navarre Beach, Florida.
“It’s not common for you to start measuring rainfall in feet,” forecaster David Eversole said in Mobile. “Sally moves so slowly, which is why she keeps hitting and hitting and hitting the area with tropical rain and powerful winds. It’s just a nightmare. “
The storm knocked out about half a million homes and businesses.
Gerald Herbrt / AP
Hurricane Sally is moving slowly, at a rate that allows the storm to collect large amounts of water to discharge on land.
It was the second hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast in less than three weeks and the latest hit in one of the busiest hurricane seasons ever recorded, so frenzied that forecasters have almost revised the alphabet of storm names by two months. and a half still to go. Let’s go. At the beginning of the week, Sally was one of five simultaneously record-breaking storms in the Atlantic, strung like charms on a bracelet.
Like the wildfires raging on the West Coast, the onslaught of hurricanes has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing slower, rainier, more powerful and more destructive storms.
An emergency team rescued two people on Dauphin Island, Alabama, after the hurricane ripped the roof off their home and the rest of the home began to crumble.
Gerald Herbert / AP
Entire communities will have to be evacuated as a result of the hurricane.
In Orange Beach, Alabama, the wind blew the walls off a corner of a condo building, exposing the interiors of the condos on at least five stories, a video posted online showed. At least 50 people were rescued from flooded homes and taken to shelters, Mayor Tony Kennon said.
“We have some people that we haven’t been able to reach because the water is too high,” Kennon said. But they are safe in their homes. As soon as the water recedes, we will rescue them. ”
In downtown Pensacola, water rushed down some streets like river rapids, forming shells as it hit buildings and rose above car tires.
Before sunrise, the water was running up to the doors of Jordan Muse’s car outside the Pensacola hotel, where his family took refuge after fleeing their mobile home. The power supply was cut off early in the morning, so it was too loaded to sleep. Her 8-year-old son was playing with toys under the desk in the hotel room while Muse stared out the window, watching the rain roll on the sheets.
“Motorized trucks are the only ones on the water and they’re the biggest,” Muse said. “I can’t believe it got so bad.”
Uncredited / AP
This GOES-16 GeoColor satellite image shows Hurricane Sally moving slowly ashore from the Gulf of Mexico.
Stacy Stewart, a forecaster with the National Hurricane Center, said the rain will be “catastrophic and life-threatening” in parts of the Gulf Coast. Meteorologists predicted 10 to 20 inches (51 cm) of rain, with up to 35 inches (89 cm) in some places.
Sally has a characteristic that is not seen often and that is a slow ground speed, and that is going to exacerbate the flooding, ” said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the hurricane center. He compared the storm’s slow pace to that of Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston in 2017.
Sally’s crawling made it difficult to predict where she would hit. Just two days before making landfall, the storm was forecast to hit New Orleans, 225 km west of where it made landfall.
Gerald Herbert / AP
The storm will cause big problems in the coming days.
So, Robert Lambrisky and his husband were caught somewhat off guard when the hurricane shook their door before dawn and forced rainwater into their home in Sanders Beach, near Pensacola. After sunrise, rough seawater covered what is normally 15 meters of beach.
“We had a warning, but this was such a strange storm,” Lambrisky said. “So all this preparation that you do, when you know the storm is coming, it was something that we only did half because we were convinced that the storm was not going to hit us.”
Sally’s effects were felt along the northern Gulf Coast. Low-income properties in southeastern Louisiana were flooded by the surge. The water covered Mississippi beaches and parts of the highway that runs parallel to them.
Hunter Dawkins / AP
The waters of the Gulf of Mexico, driven by Hurricane Sally, flood this street in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
US President Donald Trump issued emergency declarations for parts of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News Channel that Trump was in contact with state governors and was ready to help “in every way possible.”
Hurricane Laura struck southwestern Louisiana on August 27. Thousands of people were still without power due to that storm, and some were still in shelters.
DEVON RAVINE / AP
Corbin Boyce holds an American flag on the beach near Fort Walton Beach, Forida, as strong winds and waves from Hurricane Sally hit the shoreline.
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, Teddy became a hurricane Wednesday with winds of 160 kph (100 mph). Forecasters said it could reach Category 4 before approaching Bermuda, which was hit directly by Hurricane Paulette just days ago.
