ORLANDO/MIAMI – Matthew, the first major hurricane threatening a direct hit on the United States in more than 10 years, closed in on Florida on Thursday after killing at least 283 people in Haiti on its destructive march north through the Caribbean.
Carrying extremely dangerous winds of 140 mph, the storm pounded the northwestern part of the Bahamas en route to Florida’s Atlantic coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Centre said.
Matthew’s top sustained winds had dropped to 130 mph by Thursday night. But it remained a Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity as it neared Florida, where it could either plough inland or tear along the Atlantic coast through Friday night, the Miami-based centre said.
Few storms with winds as powerful as Matthew’s have struck Florida, and the NHC warned of “potentially disastrous impacts”. The U.S. National Weather Service said the storm could be the most powerful to strike northeast Florida in 118 years.
Hurricane conditions were expected in parts of Florida late on Thursday or early on Friday and a dangerous storm surge was expected to reach up to 11 feet (3.35 metres) along the Florida coast, Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the Miami-based NHC, said on CNN.
“What we know is that most of the lives lost in hurricanes is due to storm surge,” he said.
Some 283 people were killed in Haiti, local officials said, and thousands were displaced after the storm flattened homes, uprooted trees and inundated neighbourhoods earlier in the week. Four people were killed in the Dominican Republic, which neighbours Haiti.
Damage and potential casualties in the Bahamas were still unclear as the storm passed near the capital, Nassau, on Thursday and then out over the western end of Grand Bahama Island.
It was too soon to predict where Matthew might do the most of its damage in the United States, but the NHC’s hurricane warning extended up the Atlantic coast from southern Florida through Georgia and into South Carolina. More than 12 million people in the United States were under hurricane watches and warnings, according to the Weather Channel.
The last major hurricane, classified as a storm bearing sustained winds of more than 110 mph. to make landfall on U.S. shores was Hurricane Wilma in 2005. (Reuters)
