Hurricane Matthew yesterday lashed Florida with heavy rains and winds after killing more than 450 people in Haiti on its destructive march north through the Caribbean.
Matthew is the first major hurricane threatening a direct hit on the US in more than 10 years, and could be the most powerful to strike northeast Florida in 118 years, the US National Weather Service said.
It was packing gusts of 160kph as it tracked north-northwest along Florida’s east coast, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in an advisory.
Photo: AFP / NOAA-NASA GOES PROJECT
The storm downed power lines and trees and destroyed billboards in Cape Canaveral, reported Jeff Piotrowski, a 40-year-old storm chaser from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“The winds are ferocious right now,” he said. “It’s fierce.”
No significant damage or injuries had been reported in West Palm Beach and other communities in south Florida, CNN and local media reported.
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.
Matthew’s winds had dropped on Thursday night and into yesterday morning, downgrading it to a Category 3 storm. The NHC said it could either plow inland or tear along the Atlantic coast.
A dangerous storm surge was expected to reach up to 3.35m along the Florida coast, Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the Miami-based NHC, said on CNN.
“What we know is that most of the lives lost in hurricanes is due to storm surge,” he said.
The number of people killed by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti rose to at least 478 people yesterday, 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.
About 61,500 remained in shelters, the agency said.
Damage and potential casualties in the Bahamas were still unclear as the storm passed near the capital, Nassau, on Thursday and then out over the western end of Grand Bahama Island.
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