Panama City weathers brunt of Hurricane Michael's destructive force
As Hurricane Michael menaced the Florida Panhandle with howling winds and dangerous surf, residents riding out the storm in the popular resort town of Panama City Beach witnessed just how much damage it could deliver.
Videos on social media showed 155-mph winds ripping tarps off roofs and new housing on the beach collapsing into the encroaching waves.
"The windows are blown out. The whole front of it's gone," she said in a phone interview with NBC News Wednesday after the storm hit.
"We didn't think it was going to be worse than [hurricane] Ivan," she said. "We don't know why we stayed."
She said there was "lots and lots of wind and debris," and that "the rest of the beach is getting tattered with waves. The water looks like it's gone up to the dunes from here."
The hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 155 mph when it made landfall Wednesday morning, making it a Category 4 — but the winds slowed slightly as it churned over land. Three major utilities in Florida reported outages affecting hundreds of thousands of customers.
He said he was disheartened that a number of the town's 12,000 residents failed to evacuate ahead in time , instead choosing to shelter in place. Even if they wanted to, all of the bridges in the county were deemed unsafe and closed earlier Wednesday afternoon.
"If you're going to live in a beautiful place, there's always some kind of problem with it, and this is truly beautiful, even now ... it's just a shame [the hurricane is] so destructive," Thomas said.
Read more at seeded content
Here is an interesting piece of information I researched. Michael was the third worse hurricane in the history of taking down this information.
(lower mbar is higher intensity)
Was watching the track on the news, it went about twice as far inland at hurricane force than most normal hurricanes do... a very very powerful storm...
That is scary. It kept up its force farther inland than they usually do.
I have been through this kind of destruction first hand. It takes a long time to recover.
Katrina killed 1833.
Ooowww! Pretty tough talk over the inter net .Do I get scared now or wait a bit?
Well, what you would do if you had any integrity, is admit your mistake. Katrina was cat 5, period. I never realized there was a right wing lie out there that Katrina was cat 3; it's impossible to keep track of all of them though...
Actually Katrina was supposedly downgraded before it hit land. Little comfort for those of us in the path.
There are a lot of misconceptions about that hurricane, including where it hit.
New Orleans did not even get the brunt of it. The levees just could not hold the water back.
We had a 30 ft storm surge. Houses that stood for hundreds of years were wiped out.