Annihilation Came Knocking

The warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico provided the perfect environment for Hurricane Michael to intensify very rapidly as it came ashore:

After coming ashore Wednesday afternoon as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, Michael slashed a path of near-total destruction across the Florida Panhandle and into southeastern Georgia. The storm’s freakishly low pressure and sustained, brutally strong winds—which peaked at 155 miles per hour—flattened neighborhoods, snapped trees in half, and left hundreds of thousands without power. At least six people lost their lives to the storm, according to officials.

Scenes of near-cataclysm are trickling out from across Florida’s Gulf Coast. In the beachfront town of Mexico Beach, Florida, roads now provide the only interruption to piles of rubble that used to be city blocks. At Tyndall Air Force Base, also on the shore, the storm tore the roofs off military hangars and then pushed around the heavy warplanes resting inside as if they were children’s toys.

Even inland, the winds—which blew as fast as those inside a tornado—collapsed churches and gas stations, knocked 18-wheelers on their sides, and stripped dense woodland entirely of its greenery, leaving behind only clusters of huddled, naked trunks.

“Students in tropical-meteorology classes are going to be talking about this storm for 20 years,” says Colin Zarzycki, a tropical-cyclone scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.