Hurricane Matthew: 4500 flights canceled for storm, some Florida airports open

With Hurricane Matthew out at sea and aimed well north of this city known for parties, a big one broke out Thursday across the street from waves churned up by the storm.

At least three towns in the hills and coast of Haiti’s fertile western tip reported dozens of people killed, including the farming village of Chantal where the mayor said 86 people died, mostly when trees crushed houses.

Around $400,000 was sent in aid to Haiti and Jamaica from the US. “Like a top that gets knocked while it’s spinning, that had the effect of yanking the storm to the [east] just enough to keep the center off the Florida coast”.

Before Hurricane Matthew hit the United States this week the storm tore through the Caribbean, bringing torrential rain and high winds to Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas.

Hurricane Matthew has been making its way up the Florida coastline since early Thursday, bringing in sustained wind speeds of 120 miles per hour and the possibility of an 11-foot wall of water. Matthew is “unlike any hurricane in the modern era”, says the National Weather Service in Jacksonville, Florida.

A team of 116 employees was bunkered down inside Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center to ride out the hurricane.

“We’ve had some close calls, but as far as I know it’s the first time we’ve had the threat of a direct hit”, NASA spokesperson George Diller said by e-mail from the hurricane bunker. Hurricane warnings and watches have been issued, triggering evacuation orders in several areas of Florida, Georgia and SC’.

“I just want to emphasize to everybody that this is still a very unsafe hurricane that the potential for storm surge, flooding, and loss of life continues to exist and that people continue to follow the instructions of local officials”, said the president.

“Pay attention to what your local officials are telling you”, he said. “Time is running out”. A 4.73-foot storm surge measured in the St. Johns River at Mayport was the highest recorded in more than a century.

About 22,000 people were in Florida shelters and Georgia and SC also opened dozens of shelters for evacuees.

The White House warned that the destruction in Haiti could foreshadow the devastation in the U.S. Thousands of Haitians are now homeless and the government has suspended a presidential election.

State of emergencies have also been declared in Georgia and the Carolinas.

It’s a message reiterated by President Barack Obama.

As the storm closed in, an estimated 2 million people in Florida, Georgia and SC were warned to move inland to escape the fury of the most powerful hurricane to menace the US Atlantic coast in more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the magnitude of the devastation inflicted by Matthew as it roared through the Caribbean became ever clearer, with officials in Haiti raising the death toll there to almost 300, while also cautioning that there were scores of bodies that had yet to be recorded. Airlines moved planes and crews out of the storm’s path and must now fly them back into the region. At a Subco gas station in Orlando, the pumps had run dry on Wednesday.

He said: “The devastation that we are seeing is frightful”.