The latest anthropomorphized menace is Hurricane Hermine, which has been gaining strength and is expected to make landfall in Florida late Thursday night.
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On Thursday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center extended a tropical storm watch to Sandy Hook, N.J.
Hermine is the 4th hurricane of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season.
The National Hurricane Center said the storm’s top sustained winds ratcheted up from 75 miles per hour in the afternoon to 80 miles per hour by evening as the former tropical storm gained new fury nearing the coast.
A hurricane warning is in effect from Suwanee River to Mexico Beach in Florida, while areas from Anclote River to Suwanee River and west of Mexico Beach to the Walton/Bay county line are under a hurricane watch.
Acadiana will be on the favorable side of Tropical Storm Hermine over the next couple of days with hot and mostly dry weather anticipated. National Weather Service forecasters predict as much as 10 inches of rain in the southern Cape Fear region, with about 6 inches in Fayetteville. That flood made the road they depend on impassable, resident Misty Hale said.
TORNADOES: A few tornadoes are possible this Thursday afternoon into Friday morning over north Florida and southeast Georgia. “And it’s been happening all summer, so there’s not a whole lot (of beach) left to go”. Greaves said he lived in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew devastated the area in 1992.
At 11 p.m. EDT, the Category 1 hurricane was centered about 75 miles southwest of Keaton Beach, Florida, while moving north-northeast at about 14 mph. The storm is expected to make landfall tonight as a hurricane – the first to strike the state since 2005.
In coastal Franklin County, people on barrier islands and low-lying areas on the shore were being evacuated.
“We associate severe rain events like tropical events and hurricanes with increases in nuisance mosquitoes, not with disease-spreading (mosquitoes)”, Ben Beard, chief of the Bacterial Diseases Branch of CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, told CNN on Thursday. Naples Harbormaster Roger Jacobsen said that 154 sea turtle nests have been inundated with seawater, but it is uncertain how many of those nests are so badly damaged that hatchlings may not survive. Hermine will weaken after it crosses the coast.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in 51 of the state’s 67 counties.
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