“I’M STUCK WITH THEM”
Authorities in Florida’s Taylor County asked residents who did not act on mandatory evacuation warnings to write their names on their bodies with permanent marker, to aid in identification if they are killed.
In Alligator Point, a coastal town on a picturesque peninsula in the storm’s path, David Wesolowski was taking no chances.
“I just came to button up a few things before it gets too windy,” the 37-year-old real estate agent told AFP as he boarded up his house on stilts.
“If it stays on course, this is going to look different afterwards, that’s for sure,” he said.
Patrick Riickert refused to budge from his small wooden house in Crawfordville, a town of 5,000 people a few miles inland.
Most residents have bolted, but Riickert, his wife and five grandchildren were “not going anywhere,” the 58-year-old insisted.
“I am going to hunker down” and ride out the hurricane, as he did in 2018 when deadly Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 mega storm, blew through the Florida panhandle.
At a gas station in Panacea, John Luper said he was reluctantly staying put because his mother and brother refused to flee to higher ground.
“They’re not going to leave,” he said, filling jerry cans with fuel. “I’m stuck with them.”
The NHC warned of up to 51cm of rain in some spots and potentially life-threatening flooding, as well as numerous landslides across the southern Appalachians.
The National Weather Service said the region could be hit extremely hard, with floods not seen in more than a century.
“This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era,” it warned.
Tornado warnings went out across northern Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
More than 55 million Americans were under some form of weather alert or warning from Hurricane Helene.
