Storm closes in as 1 million flee Carolinas

The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm, which jumped to Category 4 strength Monday with 140 mph winds, could pummel the shore with life-threatening storm surges and soak a wide area with rains so heavy that freshwater flooding would become a major threat. It is expected to make landfall Thursday night near the North Carolina-South Carolina border.

In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Tneah Brown was listening to the warnings. At work on Monday afternoon, she weighed the many complications that would soon flow from the order issued by Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, calling on people in eight counties nearest the shore to get out.

Brown knew that evacuation was necessary. She also knew it would not be easy. There was her pit bull puppy, Kaya, to think of. And her younger sister. And her sister’s 3-week-old baby. And the question of whether her mother would join them as they rushed out of town by noon Tuesday, when the governor’s order takes effect.

“I wasn’t nervous,” Brown said in a phone interview, “until there was a mandatory evacuation.”

McMaster said at a Monday afternoon news conference that the lanes of two major divided highways — Interstate 26 and U.S. 501 — would be reversed to make them one-way, carrying traffic only away from the coast, and that two other routes might also be reversed if needed. Schools and state offices in the lower half of the state will be closed.

“We know that this evacuation order I’m issuing is going to be inconvenient for some people,” the governor said. “We do not want to risk one South Carolina life in this hurricane.”

In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper asked President Donald Trump on Monday to declare a federal state of emergency for his state. In coastal Dare County, the local emergency management agency announced a mandatory evacuation for all residents and visitors on Hatteras Island, the long, slender barrier island off the North Carolina coast, with a similar order to go into effect Tuesday for the rest of the county. Schools in 17 counties were expected to be closed Tuesday.

“The forecast places North Carolina in the bull’s-eye of Hurricane Florence, and the storm is rapidly getting stronger,” Cooper said. “When weather forecasters tell us ‘life-threatening,’ we know it’s serious. We are bracing for a hard hit.”

In Myrtle Beach, Brown said she had not yet decided where to flee to. She was thinking about Savannah, Georgia, a few hours’ drive down the coast. She did not have a place to stay there, she said, but she was hoping it would be far enough south to be out of harm’s way.

And so it went. Across the coastal South, an order to clear out is an ever-looming and rarely pleasant possibility all through hurricane season, which officially lasts June 1 to Nov. 30. Evacuation can often mean hours on choked freeways, followed by days idling in a motel, a shelter or on a friend’s sofa.

It can be a ritual of listen, flee, repeat: It has been less than two years since thousands of coastal South Carolinians followed similar official warnings to evacuate as Hurricane Matthew approached.

For government officials, issuing an evacuation order means weighing whether to disrupt not only beach vacations but also entire regional economies. The choice is rarely easy. In 2017, when Gov. Rick Scott of Florida told people in his state to flee from Hurricane Irma, he drew criticism for being too cautious.

By contrast, in Texas that same year, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston and other local officials decided not to call for an evacuation before the arrival of Hurricane Harvey, in part because they were not expecting major storm surges or especially destructive winds, and in part because they could not predict exactly where flooding might occur. When the storm’s heavy rains inundated the city with historic floods, Turner was criticized for not being cautious enough.

This week, residents of the Carolinas were left to make their own hard and familiar choices once more.

Lisa Presgraves, 48, a bartender at a restaurant in Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, said that she would ride out the storm as she always did, in her condominium in the barrier island community of Nag’s Head, even though it was included in the Dare County mandatory evacuation order.

“It’d have to be really bad for me to leave,” Presgraves said Monday afternoon. “I have a dog, and financially, it’s hard to take off and get a hotel room.”

Staying home would be no party, she said. Her black Labrador retriever, Lucas, “flips out” during hurricanes, she said. And she would be watching floodwaters with great concern: During Hurricane Matthew, she said, the water rose up to her deck. “It’s not fun,” she said. “It’s kind of stressful.”

Some experts said that Hurricane Florence’s effect could be particularly ugly. A report by the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University said that on its projected track and intensity, “this will be a worst-case scenario storm,” with record storm surges and interruptions to electric power that could last for days.

The report suggested that at Sunset Beach, North Carolina, southwest of Wilmington, the storm surge could exceed 18 feet, the record set during Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

Inland flooding was also a major concern. McMaster said that significant flooding could occur around South Carolina’s Pee Dee region in the northeastern corner of the state.

North Carolinians were worried that the storm bore similarities, in its power and its projected path, to Hurricane Fran in 1996, which churned inland, devastating the regional timber industry with losses estimated at more than $1 billion and whipping the streets of Raleigh, the state capital more than 100 miles inland, with 79 mph winds.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, northwest of the capital, Mayor Pam Hemminger spent Monday on the phone with state emergency officials and making sure that locals in flood-prone parts of town were aware of the risks.

“Flash flooding is always a concern,” she said. Also at the top of the list: “Loss of power for individuals, and our senior centers and public housing.”

Trump, who was criticized for his response to the crisis in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last year, signaled that he was on top of this storm in a pair of tweets Monday, saying his administration was mobilizing resources to respond.

Experts said that getting people away from the coast might not put them entirely out of danger, because the inland areas of the two states where many will take refuge face risks of their own.

J. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist and professor of geography at the University of Georgia, said that the probability of severe flooding is very high if Hurricane Florence stalls for several days after making landfall, as forecasters say it might. “The models are suggesting something very similar to what we saw with Harvey,” he said, referring to the catastrophic flooding in Houston and other parts of Texas and Louisiana last year.

“This is another example of a one-two-punch storm,” he said, adding that the danger may be greater from the second punch, because people are afraid of hurricane winds but think of rains and flooding as familiar problems.

As important as it is to prepare for the coastal effect, he said, people “may underestimate or undervalue” the flooding threat posed by 20 to 40 inches of rain. “People have a hard time internalizing, preparing for something that’s outside their realm of experience.” he said, but Hurricane Florence could bring conditions that people have not seen in their lifetimes.

“It’s a dire situation that I believe is setting up,” he said.

Complicating the risk, many areas in the path of the storm are already sodden with recent rainfall, Shepherd said, and the elevated terrain across much of North Carolina could lead to greater flooding and landslides.

Although climate change does not cause hurricanes, he said, it does tend to make them more destructive in a number of ways. “When we have a storm like Florence, it’s certainly going to be shoving higher sea levels onto the coastline,” he said.

Moreover, scientific research laid out in authoritative documents like the National Climate Assessment of 2015 shows that a warming climate increases the likelihood of “rainier storms,” with an increased risk of flooding.

For all of the attention on Florence, the Carolinas were not the only parts of the United States in the path of approaching storms. In the Pacific, warnings and watches were posted in Hawaii on Monday for Hurricane Olivia, a Category 1 storm, while Typhoon Mangkhut swept across the Mariana Islands and Guam.

And in the Caribbean, when Hurricane Isaac crosses the Lesser Antilles later this week, its northern side may graze Puerto Rico, where residents are still struggling to recover from last year’s catastrophic storm, Hurricane Maria.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.